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 Kindle just to see what can be unlocked. I think reading EPUB directly was the main motivation, instead of sending it through Calibre library (awesome app), but it has some friction: import, convert, connect device, send to device. KOReader is also much more customizable compared to Amazon's own reading app. I like that I can change fonts and have a sensible UI.

I found a whole ecosystem of apps (Game Boy emulators!) running through the KUAL launcher. And then there is a chess app in GnomeGames4Kindle which looks awesome. But I could not run it. No matter what I did, I kept hitting a missing libGL issue.

Turns out the configurations of jailbroken Kindles vary from gen to gen, firmware version to firmware version. So what works for one might not work for another. Or at least that is my sensing.

But chess is such a nice fit for a Kindle e-ink display. Slow pace, thinky game, turn based, graphically simple. So I looked at how to get it to run on a jailbroken Kindle. I looked through the repo, and then I made a chess game with Codex help, with reference to the original source.

Since I'm at it, I looked at the bunch of GNOME games, some of which are a good fit as well. Minesweeper is already working, so I did not want to duplicate the effort. I looked at Connect Four, Solitaire, Mahjong, Othello. And I looked outside of that: Checkers and Chinese Chess. I also looked at porting Sudoku and Go.

I've also looked at porting Balatro to Kindle. LOVE engine is open source. I own Balatro, so I can extract the assets from the Android app for testing. But LOVE engine rendering is difficult. The UI draws are recursively called and expensive on a low-powered Kindle with a low-refresh-rate e-ink display, so I got at most to a slideshow mess. And I gave up. But it was an interesting learning experience.

I've also relooked at the Doom port and Game Boy. And it's amazing that these exist. But playing Doom isn't fun. I tried to look at porting Quake, but I thought if it's not fun to play Doom, there's much less point for Quake. So I stopped there too.

The Game Boy library is extensive. There are probably a bunch of games that will be a good fit for Kindle: slower-paced, turn-based, thinky games, perhaps JRPGs. I tested out Advance Wars. But without physical tactile buttons, and without a speaker, it feels like a second-class experience. So I stopped exploring further there.

I heavily referenced existing projects to build these Kindle apps. I also noted earlier that they are extremely brittle. I only tested them, and they worked on my config. I made it such that it exports the static libraries it requires along with it, so there is a higher chance of it working on any Kindle.

This is a niche within a niche.

Among Kindles that people bought, only a small fraction will jailbreak. And only a small fraction among those will think to load games on it. Only a small fraction of those will have the compatible config. So I'm building for a vanishingly small group. And it kind of makes me a little sad.

So I leveraged progressive web apps to reach out. Basically, what has been coded for Kindle is also ported or translated into a web app hosted here so people can enjoy it. You can just load the webpage and install it if you're on Android or Chrome, or use Share > Add to Home Screen if you're on Apple.

And it has no tracking, no adverts. It's 2026. Nobody cares for those shit.

The stuff I have made here is all open source.

So enjoy.