Exact Games Collection

Classic board, card, and puzzle games that work as progressive webapps, with Kindle builds where they make sense.

Games

Webapp installation

Android or Google Chrome

1. Open the website in your browser.
2. Tap the three dots menu icon.
3. Select Add to Home screen.

iPhone or iPad

1. Open the website in the Safari browser.
2. Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow pointing up).
3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.

About the Project

It started with jailbreaking a Kindle, mostly just to see what could be unlocked.

The practical motivation was reading EPUB directly. I could send books through Calibre, and Calibre is an awesome app, but there is still friction: import, convert, connect device, send to device. KOReader also just fits better for me. I can change fonts properly, tweak the layout, and the UI makes more sense than Amazon's own reader.

After jailbreaking, I found this whole small ecosystem of apps running through the KUAL launcher. There were Game Boy emulators, utilities, and then this chess app from GnomeGames4Kindle. It looked awesome.

Chess on Kindle just makes perfect sense. Slow pace. Thinky game. Turn based. Graphically simple. No need for fast refresh, no need for sound, no need for animation. It feels like something that belongs on e-ink.

Except I could not get it to run. No matter what I tried, it kept hitting a missing libGL issue.

That was when I started realizing how brittle Kindle homebrew is. Different Kindle generations, different firmware versions, different jailbreak states, different libraries available. Something that works for one person may not work for another. Or at least that is my sensing.

So I looked through the repo and tried to figure out how to get chess running on my Kindle. With Codex helping me read and adapt the source, I ended up making a chess game with reference to the original project.

Since I was already there, I started looking at the other GNOME games too. Some of them are a good fit for Kindle as well. Minesweeper already works, so I did not want to duplicate that effort. I looked at Connect Four, Solitaire, Mahjong, Othello. Then outside of GNOME games, I looked at Checkers, Chinese Chess, Sudoku, and Go.

I also tried porting Balatro to Kindle.

The LOVE engine is open source, and I own Balatro, so I could extract the Android assets for testing. But getting it to render well was painful. The UI drawing is recursively called and expensive, and on a low-powered Kindle with a low refresh-rate e-ink display, I mostly got a slideshow mess. So I gave up there. Still an interesting learning experience.

I also relooked at the Doom port and Game Boy emulation. It is honestly amazing that these things exist. But playing Doom on Kindle is not fun. I thought about trying Quake too, but if Doom already is not fun, then Quake has even less point. So I stopped there.

Game Boy is more interesting because the library is huge. There are probably slower, turn-based, thinky games that could fit Kindle. Maybe JRPGs. I tested Advance Wars, and it sort of works as an idea. But without physical buttons, and without a speaker, it feels like a second-class experience. So I stopped exploring that further too.

That became the rough filter for the project.

Not "can this game run on Kindle?"

More like: "does this game actually make sense on Kindle?"

Slow games. Board games. Puzzle games. Turn-based games. Games where the lack of color, sound, fast refresh, and physical buttons does not destroy the experience.

A lot of what I built heavily references existing projects. I am not pretending these came from nowhere. I also know the Kindle apps are brittle. I only tested them on my own setup. I tried to package the static libraries they need together with the app, so there is a higher chance it works on other Kindles, but no promises.

And this is a niche within a niche.

Among all Kindle owners, only a small fraction jailbreak. Among those, only a small fraction will think to load games on it. Among those, only a small fraction will have a compatible setup. So I am building for a vanishingly small group.

That kind of makes me a little sad.

So I started using progressive web apps as the wider version of the same idea. The Kindle version is there for the few people who care about jailbroken Kindles. But the same games can also live as web apps, so normal people can just open a page and play.

If you are on Android or Chrome, you can install the web app. If you are on iPhone or iPad, use Share, then Add to Home Screen.

No tracking. No ads. No engagement crap.

It is 2026. Nobody needs more of that.

The stuff here is open source. Most of it started as me poking at old code, broken ports, weird devices, and games that feel like they belong on quiet screens.

Anyway, that is why these exist.