Games you cannot lose

Games you cannot lose

There are two quite different ways for a game to be unloseable, and lumping them together is why lists like this usually disappoint. Some games have a goal you cannot fail — you will finish, the only variable is how long you take. Others have no goal at all, so there is nothing to finish and nothing to fall short of. Both belong here, but they suit completely different moods, and the split below is the useful part of this page.

Where the punishment usually hides

Before the split, the method. A screen punishes you through a counter: hearts, remaining turns, a shrinking bar, a countdown. So the check is to read every number on the screen and ask what it does when it reaches its limit. Then leave the board completely untouched for 75 seconds and look again, because a session that can end while your hands are in your lap is a session that can end against your will.

Everything below has counters that only ever go up, or no counters at all, and all four boards were exactly as we left them after 75 idle seconds.

A finish line you cannot fail

Memory Game deals twenty-four face-down cards into a six-by-four grid with deep purple backs, over a night sky with a silhouetted house and bare branches. MATCHES sits top left, TURNS top right, MENU and RESTART in the bottom corners. Those two counters are the whole scoring system: one records progress, the other records effort. Turning over the wrong pair ten times in a row costs you ten on a number that has no ceiling — there is no third counter waiting to punish the second one.

Easter Memory is the same rules with the mood inverted: pale meadow background, light green card backs, the same MATCHES and TURNS pair, two round green buttons instead of the word buttons. Carrying both is deliberate rather than lazy. The rules are identical, so the only real choice on offer is whether you want a haunted house or a spring field behind the cards, and having both means that choice exists.

Either way there is an ending — every pair gets found eventually — and no route to failing.

No finish line at all

Girl Dress Up opens into a room with an open wardrobe, a green sofa and an arc lamp. The left column lists HAIR 1/7, COLOR 1/10, EYES 1/8, GLASSES 0/3, DRESS 1/10, COLOR 1/4, SHOE 0/9; the right side adds LIPS, BODY and NAILS. Every row has an arrow on each side. Those fractions look like a score until you realise they are positions in a list: item one of seven, not one point out of seven. Any of them can be scrolled forward and back forever.

Fashion Dress Up stages two characters at once in a room with an open window and a vase of flowers, each with its own menu down its own side of the screen — BODY, HAIR, COLOR, EYEBROWS, EYES, BEARD, DRESS, SHOES on one; BODY, HAIR, COLOR, EYEBROWS, EYES, LIPS, NAILS, DRESS, SHOE on the other. Buttons at the bottom switch between dressing one figure or both, and there is a save button for the result. No number on that screen means points.

What we removed, and how it gave itself away

Opening every candidate cut the planned list from nine down to four.

Supercars Puzzle and Crossword for Kids both greyed out on their own and offered a replay circle, with a line reading Timer: 0 underneath — a clock had been running the entire time without being obvious during play. Kids True Color prints TIME in the middle of the lower edge; we watched it fall from 54 to zero, flanked by tick and cross counters. Professor Bubble posted its own HIGH SCORE panel. Plumber threw itself back to the level select. And two arithmetic titles that share a name in the catalogue never got past the studio logo for our tooling, so we cannot tell you how they differ and will not guess.

A set advertised as unloseable that quietly contains loseable games is worth nothing, so the list shrank instead.

Who this actually suits

People coming back to games after years away, people playing at the end of a tiring day, and anyone looking for something to hand to a person who does not normally play. The memory pair still asks you to think; it simply never charges you for thinking wrong. The dress-up pair removes right and wrong from the screen entirely.

If you want something with a little more tension but still no timer, the untimed set is the next step, and the wider shelves are the kids category and the dress-up category.

Questions about playing without stakes

How many titles are in this set right now?

Four: two memory boards and two dress-up rooms. That is far fewer than planned, because the list was rebuilt to match what the testing showed rather than the other way round.

Are they all easy, then?

Not exactly. Remembering the positions of twenty-four cards is real work. The difference is that being wrong costs you a rising TURNS number and nothing else — no lives, no restart, no ending.

Is there anything here for someone who likes designing?

Yes — the two dress-up games let you try a combination, change your mind and try again without limit, and Fashion Dress Up includes a save button for the finished result.

Can I keep what I make?

Nothing of yours is stored on our side. The save button belongs to the game itself, so if you close the tab without using it, you start fresh next time.