Games to Play When Bored: 20 Ideas, Sorted by How Much Time You Have
Boredom comes in different sizes. Two minutes in a line is a different problem from a free period at school, and both are different from a rainy Sunday. So this list is sorted by how much time you have and where you are.
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If you have one or two minutes
Games where a round is shorter than the wait.
1. Micro Meme Mania. Five-second microgames, one word each: POP, SLICE, FEED, DODGE. You have one finger and a burning fuse. The speed keeps rising, and every fail turns into a captioned meme at the end of the run.
2. Capybara Stack. Drop things on a calm capybara's head and see how high the tower goes before it falls. One tower takes about a minute.
3. A daily puzzle. Daily games give you one puzzle a day and then stop, which makes them perfect for short gaps. Purrzzle (place the cats), Hear the Meme (guess a meme by sound) and Slang Five (guess the slang word) each take two to five minutes.
4. Count something. Not a game until you make it one. Count red cars, people wearing hats, or how many times the person next to you says "literally". Guess the number first.
If you have ten minutes in class or on a break
5. Troll Level. A platformer that lies to you. The floor drops out, the door runs away and the spikes jump at you. Each level is a short joke, so you can play two or three and stop. Your failed tries come back as ghosts that replay next to you, which is both helpful and humiliating.
6. A logic puzzle. Grid puzzles and liar-and-truth-teller puzzles fit a ten-minute break well, and they look like work from across the room. Our logic puzzles for adults article has ten types to try.
7. Spot the difference. Spot the Wrong Note gives you two animated scenes and 60 seconds to find five differences, including ones that are in the motion, not in the picture.
8. Riddles. One person reads, everyone else guesses. Here are 50 riddles with answers, sorted from easy to impossible.
9. Twenty questions. One person thinks of something. Everyone else gets twenty yes or no questions to guess it. Needs no screen and works in any classroom when the teacher says you can talk.
If you have an hour and want something to sink into
10. An idle game. Idle games keep going even when you stop playing, so you can play for five minutes, come back in an hour and find progress waiting. Shred Everything starts with a sheet of homework and ends with a whole house going through the shredder.
11. A card game. Solitaire is the classic solo time-killer for a reason. If you have never learned the rules properly, here is our guide to solitaire rules.
12. A puzzle game with levels. Games with 30 to 75 short levels are perfect for an hour: you always feel close to the next one. Meme Exit asks you to tap pets out of a room through doors of their color, and Longpaw has a dachshund who must fill the whole board in one path.
13. Learn something useless. Pick a topic you know nothing about and read about it for twenty minutes. Why capybaras are so calm is a good start: here is the explanation.
If you are bored with a friend
14. Air hockey on one phone. Paw Hockey puts the phone flat between you, each player gets a paddle, and the pucks are cats. A new puck drops in every 20 seconds until five are flying around.
15. Head soccer. Meme Heads Soccer gives each player a thumb button on their side of the screen. Short, loud matches.
16. Pass-the-phone card games. Crazy eights works on one phone with a privacy screen between turns. More ideas in our list of 2 player games on one phone.
17. Would you rather. Take turns asking. The rule that makes it good: both options have to be equally bad, or equally good.
If you are bored with no screen at all
18. Paper games. Tic-tac-toe, hangman, dots and boxes. Dots and boxes is the best of the three for two people who are actually trying.
19. Draw the same thing. Both people draw the same object from memory, for example a bicycle, in one minute. Compare. Almost nobody can draw a bicycle that would actually work.
20. The alphabet game. Pick a category, like animals or foods. Take turns naming one for each letter of the alphabet. The first person to get stuck loses. Q and X decide most games.
Why some games beat boredom better than others
The games that work best for short waits have three things in common: they start instantly, a round is short, and there is a reason to play one more. Daily puzzles add a fourth: they stop on their own, so you do not lose an hour by accident.
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