Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to built my 15-year-old game idea
Distro Fighter: WARS is in closed beta, but HN gets its own door: https://distrofighter.com/wars?beta=hackernews-2026 - the arcade at https://distrofighter.com is open to everyone. Promotions happen at midnight tonight (weekly) and the seasons (migration) are quarterly. With a massive surprise at the end of each year.
Distro Fighter: WARS is an arcade game currently in closed beta, with a public arcade available to all players. The game features weekly promotions at midnight, quarterly seasonal migrations, and annual surprises.… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
The HN Arcade▲352I love seeing all the small games that people build and post to this site. I don't want to forget any, so I have built a directory/arcade for the games here that I maintain. Feel free to check it out, add your game if its missing and let me know what you think. Thanks!
Jan 2026 · andrewgy8.github.io · its alternatives →
- 2

Free multiplayer dogfights in your browser, the official reboot of the 2017 hit. Five aircraft, five game modes, no download.
2017 · airma.sh · its alternatives →
- 3AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 4

I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…
2024 · lanparty.house · its alternatives →
- 5

Hey HN, I hacked together this fun project that lets you play any article on the front page of Hacker News as an interactive text game. You can create a game about anything by going to infinityarcade.com/ You can also use a URL, which is what this page uses. The whole thing is open source: https://github.com/themaximal1st/InfinityArcade
2023 · infinityarcade.com · its alternatives →
- 6

A replayable arcade shooter where you control a snake of heroes. - a327ex/SNKRX
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

Bot Land is no longer playable as of October 22nd, 2020.
2019 · bot.land · its alternatives →
- 8PWPong Wars▲490
The eternal battle between day and night, good and bad. Written in JavaScript with some HTML & CSS in one index.html. Feel free to reuse the code and create your own version.
2024 · pong-wars.koenvangilst.nl · its alternatives →
- 9IM
I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com · its alternatives →
- 10

I'm making a platform for simple open source games you can play anywhere. Games are all just JavaScript classes and you can read the source of every game on the platform. I started working on initial "games" (mostly rendering tests) in 2018 and eventually built all of the platform stuff around it to make it easy to share games. There's also an in-browser editor available for you to make and publish games all from the browser. Would love some feedback on the games and studio features as well as the platform overall. All of the code is available at https://github.com/homegamesio
Jul 2026 · homegames.io · its alternatives →
- 11

Challenge top dev in an epic GitHub contribution showdown!
2025 · epicdevbattlesofhistory.com · its alternatives →
- 12HN
One night I was deep in a rabbit hole, reading old HN comments. I eventually ended up scraping a bunch of usernames and building a game! Please suggest any other users who you'd want to see/upstanding members of the community who deserve to be featured.
2023 · hngitblame.com · its alternatives →
- 13IS
Hey everyone! Long time lurker, first time poster. I've just reached beta in my game BoxByte Lyte. -What is it- It's a free 3d arcade game for hardcore players that uses color matching in interesting ways. Also it's a one button game, well movement and one button. Cool huh? The final release will be free too. -What I need- This is a very challenging game, so I really need to balance the difficulty so that it's still hard but not impossible. It would be great just to hear your experiences of the game and how far in it you got. -Where can I report bugs?-…
2015 · its alternatives →
- 14

- 15

- 16SS
I've been playing with trying to get the most out of regular terminal (ansi) graphics rendering for an mmorpg game for a bit of fun. Thought that I might take a quick detour and make a streetfighter style game that turned out better than I thought it would. Type "ssh sshfighter.com" in your terminal to play Visit the website https://sshfighter.com to watch replays etc (tv feature is cool) My friends and I have been working on bot models for a bit of fun, you can queue against them if you want to and they have their own leaderboard. look at /bots if you want to make your own.…
Aug 2026 · its alternatives →
- 17

This is something that I've been working on on-and-off in my spare time for the last few years. I started in 2020 during Covid trying to do a Mount and Blade style map in UE4, and it grew from there until where it is now - I would just add a feature, then another, until it came together. Since the start of the year I've really been trying to polish it some more. I've got the full thing planned for a Q3 25 release. Github release if you don't have Steam: https://github.com/joe-gibbs/fall-of-an-empire-release
2024 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 18

You will control the full-fledged Genome Fighter
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 19

- 20

X-wing simulator based on the iconic Star Wars battle!
2015 · its alternatives →
- 21

- 22

Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world · its alternatives →
- 23

- 24

Also compare
- The HN Arcade alternatives
- Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game alternatives
- A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released alternatives
- I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties alternatives
- Play the front page of Hacker News as interactive text games alternatives
- I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →