afk-arcade

A terminal game arcade. Browse games published by devs, save them to your library, and play them — right from your terminal.

Get started

Just play — nothing to install:

npx afk-arcade

↑↓ pick a game · ↵ play · B back · q quit. The first time you play a game you confirm a one-time trust prompt (↵) — listings are reviewed, but games are third-party code.

Play beside your agent — the arcade pops up while Claude Code works:

npx afk-arcade install

Save favorites + sync with the web — ties to your GitHub and syncs both ways with afk-arcade.pages.dev/profile:

npx afk-arcade login

Then in the arcade S saves a game to your library (L), and D pins your default game.

Keys

• Browse: ↑↓ pick · ↵ view · R rate · L library · W wallet · P publish · q quit
• Detail: ↵ play · S save · R rate · B back
• Library: ↵ play · R rate · X remove · D pop-up (syncs to web) · B back

Games are npm packages and launch via npx <package>@latest. The first time you play a game you'll be asked to confirm — listings are reviewed before they appear, but games are third-party code.

Rating

When a game exits back to the arcade, a one-line strip asks you to rate it — press 1-5 and you're done. Any other key dismisses it. It asks once per game, and never again once you've rated.

Rate a game any time with [R] on a highlighted row. Add a comment with [C] while the strip is up. Not signed in? Your rating is saved locally — the strip reads saved · sign in to post — and posts the next time you sign in.

Play while your agents work

Install the wait-game hooks with npx afk-arcade install: every prompt you send opens the arcade in a pane beside the agent's terminal, so you can watch it work while you play. No tmux required — the hook also splits zellij, WezTerm, and kitty, or opens a new Terminal.app window on macOS (see the main README for the full surface chain and its warts).

The pane opens on a 3-second countdown card that names your game and starts it — zero keypresses needed. It picks your [D] pin, else the last game you played, else afk-snake. Press ↵ to play right away, or any other key to cancel into a numbered switch list (1-6 — digits jump straight in, no arrowing needed).

Quit back out of a game and you land on a session-home card — ↵ play again, [S] switch, [F] focus, [Q] back to Claude — showing your best score and today's rank if you're signed in (both are skipped if you're signed out or offline, never shown as zero).

The old full-screen "your agent is ready" takeover is gone. When the agent finishes (or pauses to ask you something), that's now a one-line strip drawn under whatever card is showing — ✓ agent ready · [Q] back to Claude — so it never interrupts a game in progress. It clears the moment you send the agent a new prompt.

Mid-game is the one exception: if the agent finishes while you're actually playing, the arcade pauses the game — an OS-level freeze, so it works for every game with zero per-game support — and paints "YOUR AGENT IS READY" over it. Press ↵ (or Ctrl-C) to end the game and return to the agent's terminal, closing the pane; any other key resumes the game exactly where you left off.

Press [F] for focus mode: the pane stays closed for the rest of the current Claude session — no more auto pop-ups until a new session starts. The tmux resume hotkey (Ctrl-S by default, see the main README) clears focus and reopens the pane, so you're never locked out.

Under the hood, alongside the existing $TMPDIR/term-game-popup.pid, the hooks keep two more files: $TMPDIR/term-game-agent.json (busy/ready state plus the Claude session id, so a stale signal from an old session can't lie about being ready) and $TMPDIR/term-game-focus (present only while focus mode is on for the current session).

Keys are uniform across every wait-game screen: ↵ always plays, Q always returns to Claude, S switches games, F is focus.

Auto pop-up beside your agent

npx afk-arcade install

Wires Claude Code hooks so the arcade opens beside your agent whenever it's working — a tmux / zellij / WezTerm / kitty / iTerm2 split, or a new window. It counts down and auto-starts your session game (press D on a game in the library to pin one as the default; otherwise it's the last game you played, or afk-snake) — see "Play while your agents work" above for the full countdown / switch / session-home flow. Options: --key <C-s> sets the resume hotkey, --no-window disables the new-window fallback.

This replaces any afk-snake install wait-game — run one, not both.

npx afk-arcade uninstall   # remove the hooks

Publishing your game

Publish your terminal game to the arcade from the TUI:

1. Ship your game to npm (any package with a bin that runs in a terminal).
2. Run npx afk-arcade, press P, and fill in the form (GitHub login required).
3. Your submission is reviewed; once approved it appears in the arcade.

In-game purchases: see docs/arcade-purchases.md for the credits API and revenue split (70% to you).

For the curious

The registry lives on the same Cloudflare Worker as afk-snake's economy. The arcade never hosts or executes game code server-side — npm hosts packages, the registry stores listings.

Links

• Browse the arcade on the web: https://afk-arcade.pages.dev
• Building a game with in-game purchases? See the purchase API contract in docs/arcade-purchases.md (70% revenue share to devs).