Most of the games on MerryArcade are very old. Cribbage has been pegged on wooden boards for about four hundred years, mancala is far older than that, and people were puzzling over word squares long before anyone carried a screen in their pocket. Games like these last because they are passed along, usually across a kitchen table, from someone who already knows how to play to someone who is about to find out.
These articles are our attempt to do that passing along properly. Each one is written to stand on its own, whether or not you ever click through to a game. You will find a patient guide to teaching a child their first card game, a plain-English walk through counting a cribbage hand, the Sudoku techniques that genuinely move you from stuck to solved, and a careful look at what brain-training games can and cannot do for you.
We write for families and friends who play across generations: grandparents who learned rummy decades ago, parents squeezing in a game after dinner, and children meeting Go Fish for the very first time. Where we describe one of our own games, the rules we give are the rules that game actually uses, and where tables commonly play differently we say so. Pick whatever catches your eye, and if an article inspires a game, the ones it mentions are waiting at the bottom of the page.