I Keep Building the Games I Want to Play
A few months ago I published Polis — a city builder that runs in a browser tab. One HTML file. No install, no account, no store.
It did well enough that I kept going.
So now there’s pixelagora.com. A hub for the strategy and world-building games I’ve been making with Claude.
The rule for what goes there is simple: it has to be a game I actually play. Not a demo. Not a portfolio piece. Something I’d open at 11pm and lose forty minutes to.
Right now that’s three: Chessmate, Polis, and Imperium — a 3D real-time strategy game in the spirit of Age of Empires, running in a tab. Two of them, Chessmate and Imperium, you can, optionally, play against a friend.
Every one of them:
Runs in your browser. Works on your phone. No login. No payment. No ads. No “sign up to save your progress.” You click. It loads. You play.
That last part sounds trivial. It isn’t. Somewhere along the way games became accounts, launchers, patches, subscriptions, and battle passes. The friction became the business model.
I don’t have a business model. That’s the point.
Building these used to be a two-year commitment with a team. The work didn’t disappear — it just stopped requiring a team. And when the cost of making something collapses, the reason to make it changes. You stop asking what it’ll return. You just build the thing you wanted to exist.
The agora was where Athenians went to argue, trade, and waste time together. Free entry.
pixelagora.com — pick one and play.