The simple-game skill: ship a playable game in one sitting

A game is the best first thing to build, and not because it's easy. It's the best because you can't lie to yourself about whether it worked. You press a key and the thing moves, or it doesn't. The simple-game skill builds one as a single file that opens in any browser and works on a phone.

Send someone a website and they say 'nice'. Send them a game and they play it, then text you their score. That reaction is what keeps a beginner building, and it's why we point people here when they say they don't know what to make first.

The skill gives you a menu with honest time tags, from a 15-minute clicker up to a one-evening platformer. Then it writes a short spec with you before it builds anything, because vague rules are where games go wrong, not the code. Ten to fifteen flat rules and you have a complete game.

A skill is a folder Claude Code reads when you type its slash command. Copy it in and you're done.

Restart Claude Code, or just start a new session. That's the whole install. No API keys, no config, nothing to sign up for.

Type /simple-game. It offers about eight classics with time tags: clicker, memory match, and whack-a-mole at 15 minutes, snake, breakout, and a flappy-style tapper at about an hour, a one-level platformer or a small tower defense for a whole evening. Name a game that isn't on the list and it'll tell you honestly which bucket it lands in.

Then it writes the rules with you, one rule per line, and reads them back asking whether any line is doing two things. It builds the file, saves it to your computer, opens it, and asks you to play it and not be nice about it. Five to ten rounds of 'it's too fast to react to' or 'the jump feels floaty' is normal. Game feel is almost entirely iteration.

Pick one from the menu and give it a subject from your own life. That subject is what makes people forward it.

Change one thing per round. Change three at once and you learn nothing about which one mattered.

Exactly one. One twist makes the game yours. Two makes it confusing.

Here's the skill and why it's worth building tonight, in about 60 seconds of talking.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand new free Claude skill that takes you from I've never built anything to a real game your friends can play tonight.
2. 2Mechanism: you pick a game off a menu tagged by how long each one takes, and it turns that into a list of flat rules, one rule per line, before it builds anything. Then it writes the game and opens it so you can play it and say what felt wrong. Last comes the pass that makes it yours, where snake becomes your dog chasing treats and your name goes on the title screen.
3. 3Transformation: you stop wondering whether you can actually build something. You send a link, someone texts back their score, and that's the night you start believing it.
4. 4Close: free, and there are 54 more skills in that repo. Going from a game your friends play to something people pay for is the longer road, and we walk it inside Claude Code Club. $9 a month, link's below.

Tonight: build a one-hour one, get it online, and send it to three people asking for their score.