Finished inside three minutes

Finished inside three minutes

The problem this set solves is not boredom. It is the reluctance to start something you would have to abandon. Three spare minutes is enough for a whole round of everything in here, and nothing in here punishes you for closing the tab: the site keeps no account, no streak and no saved progress, so an abandoned round costs exactly nothing.

What we can tell you precisely is what stops a round, because every one of these games prints its own stopping condition somewhere on the screen. That turns out to be more useful than an average round length, and it is the thing you can check us on.

Rounds a clock ends

Four titles show a running clock, and the number is right there on the glass while you play.

• Fruit Slasher — a red clock reading 00:27 in the top bar, next to three hearts and a fruit-basket counter, over a green cartoon forest with apples and cherries crossing the screen.
• Traffic Command — a stopwatch that starts just under 00:59, with a car quota of 10 and three hearts, over an isometric seaside boulevard complete with parasols and a sailboat.
• Brick Out — 01:57 on the clock, three hearts, and a brick counter reading 2 of 150 while a candy village of purple mushroom houses and swirl lollipops sits behind the board.
• Gold Miner — an hourglass at 56 and a target of 670 to hit before it empties; the screen splits into sky above and brown earth below, with nuggets, a money bag and a skull buried in it.

If you genuinely have three minutes and no more, these are the surest picks, because the game itself agrees to finish.

Rounds an ammunition or shot count ends

• Duck Shooter — a fairground stall of wooden shelves, yellow rubber ducks with red targets and blue chicks in eggshells; the top bar reads TIME 06, SCORE and BULLETS 8, and by the time we photographed it there were bullet holes in the woodwork where our shots had missed.
• Quick Dice — no clock at all. A bowling-alley floor, a white die at the top between two blue arrows, a stack of red chevrons down the middle, and three score fields: High Score, Score and Last Score. The round is as long as your luck.

Rounds one mistake ends

• Handless Millionaire — a prize ladder of fifteen steps climbing from one cent to a million on the right of the screen, a guillotine blade in the middle with red marks already on it, a cartoon crowd in purple silhouette behind, and the instruction TAP HERE IF YOU READY! printed under the blade. Reach in, take the money, do not be there when the blade drops.
• Traffic Racer — a yellow sports car on a multi-lane seaside boulevard, with an analogue speedometer marked to 240, two smaller dials for revs and fuel, a stopwatch at 00:57 and a distance figure of 4.7 KM. It runs until you hit something.
• Angry Cat Shot and Duck Hunter — both open on a single score field (TOTAL SCORE and TOP SCORE respectively) and a launch button; one flings an orange tabby head-first over green hills, the other sits a cartoon dog in a meadow with a duck in its thought bubble.

Rounds you end yourself

• Car Physics — a green eight-wheeled armoured carrier on red-brown ground, FUEL and NITRO bars in the corner, $200 banked, a white tachometer at the bottom and a RESTART button sitting permanently on screen. That button is the tell: this one expects you to decide when a run is over.
• Hit 'em Up — opens on a green radar-style world map with about twenty location pins, one of them glowing in South America, and a coin counter at zero. You pick a target, play it, come back to the map. The natural stopping point is between pins rather than inside one.

Picking by the time you actually have

Under a minute: take Duck Shooter or Fruit Slasher, both of which stop on their own well inside that. A full three: Brick Out and Gold Miner, whose printed clocks fill the window almost exactly. Somewhere in between and you want the middle group, because a round there is as long as your attention and ends the moment it lapses.

If you would rather have the opposite — nothing counting down at you at all — that is a different set entirely, and it is the untimed one.

Questions about short rounds

How many short titles are gathered here?

Twelve, chosen because a single round of each fits in the gap between other things.

Do I lose progress by closing the tab halfway?

No. There is no account here, nothing accumulates between visits on our side, and no round in this set carries anything into the next one. Closing the tab is a legitimate way to finish.

Which one is shortest?

Duck Shooter, by its own clock: the timer we watched sat at six seconds with eight bullets left, and both of those run out fast. Quick Dice can be shorter still if the dice go badly, but that is luck rather than design.