Neal.fun: The Best Toy Box on the Internet

Neal.fun is one person’s collection of interactive toys, and it is the single best argument that the web is still fun. Neal Agarwal builds things like The Password Game, Asteroid Launcher, Absurd Trolley Problems and The Deep Sea, each one a self-contained idea, executed perfectly, playable in one browser tab, free.

There is no feed and no account. There is a grid of tiles. Click one.

What is Neal.fun?

Most “interactive content” on the internet is a marketing quiz. Neal.fun is the real thing: dozens of original projects, each of which takes a single concept and pushes it exactly as far as it will go, then stops.

Some are games. Some are data visualizations you scroll through. Some are cruel little psychological experiments dressed up as jokes. They share a house style, clean, unfussy, fast to load, no tutorial, and a sense of humor that is dry rather than loud.

What makes the site remarkable is the hit rate. Almost every tile on that homepage is worth your time. Plenty of studios with real budgets can’t say that.

What can you do on Neal.fun?

A tour of the greatest hits:

• The Password Game: create a password. Then the rules keep arriving. It must include a month. It must contain a chess move. It must include today’s Wordle answer. It escalates into pure chaos, and you will keep going far longer than is dignified.
• Absurd Trolley Problems: a run of increasingly ridiculous trolley dilemmas, and after each one it shows you what percentage of everyone else pulled the lever. That second part is the real experiment.
• Asteroid Launcher: pick an asteroid’s size, speed and angle, drop it on any point on a map, and watch the crater, fireball, shockwave and wind radius get calculated. Everyone drops one on their own town first. Everyone.
• The Deep Sea: scroll straight down through the ocean, meeting each creature at the depth it actually lives. It gets dark fast, in both senses.
• Size of Space: the same scroll trick pointed upward, from a person to the observable universe.
• Internet Artifacts: a scrollable museum of the early internet, object by object, from the first modem sounds onward.

And a couple of dozen more besides, clickers, calculators, tiny experiments, things that defy category.

Tips to get the most out of it

Start with The Deep Sea, not The Password Game. Everyone recommends the Password Game first, but it’s an endurance test. The Deep Sea is the one that makes people say “oh, this site is special” in about forty seconds.

Play Absurd Trolley Problems with someone else. Answering alone is fine. Arguing about the answers is the actual game, and the percentage reveal settles or escalates every argument.

Use Asteroid Launcher on somewhere you know. The numbers mean nothing abstractly. Drop a rock on your own postcode and the shockwave radius suddenly has a very specific meaning.

Don’t rush the scroll pieces. The Deep Sea, Size of Space and Internet Artifacts are paced deliberately. Scrolling fast to “finish” them destroys the whole effect, the point is the distance between things.

Check back every few months. New projects appear without fanfare. The homepage grid is the changelog.

Give the Password Game a real attempt. Yes it’s a troll. Yes you will lose. But the design underneath is a genuinely clever essay about how bad password rules ruin everything, and you only get that by suffering through it.

If you like Neal.fun, also try…

• The Useless Web: one button, endless pointless destinations. The scattergun version of the same joy.
• Universal Paperclips: a clicker game that quietly becomes the best playable lesson in AI alignment ever made.
• The Evolution of Trust: a playable explainer that makes game theory genuinely click.
• Scale of the Universe: if Size of Space left you wanting more zoom, this is the deeper cut.

More to click in Entertainment & Fun.

Open Neal.fun and pick whichever tile has the strangest name. That’s the correct method.