The hardest part of vibe coding is the waiting. Your agents are off doing their thing, you have nothing to do, and the office laptop is locked down. So run a game in the terminal you already have open, and pull in a coworker over the LAN.

Quick start

pip install arcade-games

arcade                 # open the menu
arcade snake           # jump straight into a game
arcade mp              # play a friend over the network
arcade list            # every game, with your high scores

That is the whole story. The games use Python's built-in curses; on Windows the install adds windows-curses for you. Nothing else to install.

play still works too, as an alias for arcade, kept around for anyone already used to it.

Play with a friend

Three games go two-player over a local network, one hosts and the other joins by IP. No account, no server, no configuration.

arcade mp            # or press M in the menu

Pick Reversi, Connect Four, or Pong, then Host or Join. The host reads out an address like 192.168.1.5 : 8765; the other player types it in. Reversi and Connect Four are turn-based and rock-solid at any latency; Pong is real-time and best on the same Wi-Fi.

The games

Arcade

Snake  ·  arcade snake Eat, grow, and don't bite your tail.	Pac-Man  ·  arcade pacman Clear the dots, dodge four hunting ghosts.
Dino Runner  ·  arcade dino Jump the cacti, run forever.	Breakout  ·  arcade breakout Bounce the ball, break every brick.
Space Shooter  ·  arcade shooter Waves, power-ups, and bosses.	Flappy Bird  ·  arcade flappy Flap through the gaps.
Frogger  ·  arcade frogger Cross the traffic and the river to the home bays.

Puzzle

Tetris  ·  arcade tetris Stack, clear lines, level up. Ghost piece included.	2048  ·  arcade 2048 Slide and merge to the big tile.
Minesweeper  ·  arcade mines Read the numbers, flag the mines. Three sizes.	Sokoban  ·  arcade sokoban Push each box onto a target. Undo freely.

Head to head _{(vs AI or a friend)}

Pong  ·  arcade pong

Reversi  ·  arcade reversi

Connect Four  ·  arcade connect4

Word & casino

Wordplay  ·  arcade wordplay (also word, wp) One 5-letter word a day. 6 guesses, a keyboard that remembers, and a streak to protect.	Blackjack  ·  arcade blackjack (also bj, 21) 6-deck shoe, dealer stands on soft 17, blackjack pays 3:2, split up to 3 times.
Roulette  ·  arcade roulette The European wheel (single zero, 2.70% house edge). Straight up, splits, dozens, and every even-money bet.	Slots  ·  arcade slots (also slot) 3 reels, a real paytable, and a computed payout rate in the 92-96% band.

The chips are not real money. Blackjack, Roulette, and Slots share a virtual, in-app points balance (starts at 1000, with a small once-a-day top-up if you ever hit zero). There is no purchase, no deposit, no cash-out, and no way to turn a chip into anything of real-world value, anywhere in this codebase. It is a toy, on purpose.

Controls

 WASD / Arrows   Move, aim, navigate
 Space           Jump · Hard drop · Launch · Fire · Serve · Place · Reveal
 W               Rotate (Tetris)
 F               Flag a cell (Minesweeper)
 U               Undo (Sokoban)
 R               Reset level (Sokoban) · Retry after game over
 P               Pause
 ? / H           In-game controls
 M               Multiplayer (menu) · T  Theme (menu)
 ESC / Q         Quit (progress is saved)

Space Shooter, Pong, and Minesweeper ask for a difficulty. Snake, Dino, and Flappy speed up as you go; Tetris levels up. Quit any game and it resumes next time you open it.

Wordplay and the casino games are turn-based and use their own keys instead of WASD: type letters and press Enter in Wordplay; H)it, S)tand, D)ouble, and X)split in Blackjack; arrows to pick a bet and F to spin in Roulette; Left/ Right to set your bet and Space to pull the lever in Slots. Press ? in any game for the full list.

Turn-based mode

For playing a move at a time in a chat or an editor, arcade cli runs the games as plain text, no full-screen UI and no curses required.

arcade cli start connect4    # also: snake, 2048, minesweeper
arcade 4                     # drop a disc in column 4
arcade show                  # reprint the board
arcade quit                  # end the game

Built honestly

A small shared core plus one file per game, with a dependency-free test suite you can run yourself:

arcade_games/
├── game.py         # the Game base class every game subclasses
├── config.py        # save files, high scores, config migration
├── currency.py        # the shared virtual chip balance (casino games only)
├── menu.py               # the curses main menu
├── cli.py                 # the plain-text `arcade cli` front-end
├── net.py                   # LAN multiplayer
├── render.py, theme.py, terminal.py    # drawing, color themes, terminal launch
└── games/
    ├── snake.py, tetris.py, g2048.py, dino.py, breakout.py,
    │   shooter.py, pong.py, flappy.py, minesweeper.py, pacman.py,
    │   sokoban.py, reversi.py, frogger.py, connect4.py,
    │   wordplay.py, blackjack.py, roulette.py, slots.py

python tests/test_games.py     # a headless fuzz, save/load, network, and a
                               # regression test behind every fix

Every GIF in this README is rendered straight from the game code, so what you see is what you get.

Contributing

Pull requests welcome. A new game is a subclass of Game in its own file under arcade_games/games/, added to _GAMES in arcade_games/registry.py; a new level or theme is a few lines. Please run the tests first.

License

MIT