NEURAL GAMES

Learning games that don't feel like homework

Neural Games is a small, free arcade from Neural Industries. Every game here takes something children are asked to practise over and over — times tables, touch-typing — and hides it inside a game worth playing for its own sake. They run in the browser using WebGL, so there is nothing to install, nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay.

• Free, with no adverts inside the games and no in-app purchases.
• No sign-up — progress saves on the device, so children give us nothing.
• Best experience — currently laptop, Mac & PC in any modern browser.
• Made for ages 6+, with difficulty you choose rather than one fixed level.

What's in the arcade

Times Table Zombies 3D is a multiplication game: a horde shuffles up a moonlit graveyard toward your fence, each zombie wearing a number, and you blast the one carrying the right answer. You pick which of the 2 to 20 tables to practise, so it can be a gentle 2, 5 and 10 session or a full 6, 7, 8, 9 workout. Wrong answers cost you the fence, right answers build a combo, and a crowned boss arrives every few kills.

Science Storm 3D is a chemistry and physics adventure. A strange energy event has pulled matter apart inside a research institute, and you put it back together by learning how it works: build an atom one proton at a time and watch hydrogen become helium become oxygen, walk into a periodic table you can reach out and touch, bond atoms into water and carbon dioxide, and turn the gravity down to move a reactor core you could never lift. Build the wrong molecule and it tells you what you actually made, which is usually more interesting.

TypeQuest 3D teaches touch-typing as a space adventure. Six guided lessons start at the home row and build up a real technique — the correct finger for each key, eyes on the screen rather than the keyboard — and four 3D mini-games turn that practice into play: keep a balloon flying, hold a jet in the air, run as a dinosaur, and defend a castle, all by typing words accurately and quickly.

Marble Sort 3D is a sorting puzzle. Three towers of coloured tiles stand over a loop that never stops turning, and a wall of bricks waits underneath with three holes in each. Tip a tile and its marbles spill into the loop, where every one drops into the first hole it passes that matches its colour — so the order you tip them in is the whole game. A marble with nowhere to go keeps circling, and the loop only holds so many.