Take a break

The gamepad icon in the header opens the break room. It always opens on the shelf of games, and a ribbon marks the one you played last, so one press takes you back into it in the way you last played. All games takes you back to the shelf.

Every game takes about five minutes and one thumb or one mouse, and each one has a number to beat. You pick how you want to play: every game has a calm way, with no way to fail and no clock, and a competitive way, with a clock, a few misses to spend or a tower that ends on the first slip. Nothing competitive is forced on you, and a game remembers the way you last played it.

What every game has#

• A Tutorial row on the start menu that never goes away. It plays the lesson from the start whenever you ask, and a tutorial round keeps no score, so replaying it cannot earn anything twice. How to play has the same button, with pictures from the game itself and the controls for touch, mouse and keyboard.
• Restart in the bar at the top during a level. It asks for a second press so a stray tap never throws a round away.
• Play it again beside Next when a level ends, if you want another go at the same one.
• A place and a time of day. Each game has a few places to play in, and the sky can follow your clock or stay at dawn, day, dusk or night. You set both from the start menu, and they follow you to your other devices.
• Welcome back. Leave in the middle of a round and the game keeps it. Next time you open it, a card asks whether to carry on.
• A place that notices you. The room answers what you do. A ball or a card that lands kicks up whatever the season has on the ground: snow, leaves, petals, dust, or a splash when it is raining. A big hit or a win sends the birds up, and you hear their wings. A combo turns the lamps up for a moment. Something fast pushes the falling snow aside, and when the wind gets up, the trees, the hanging lamps and the weather all move with it. Rain darkens the ground the longer it falls. The characters feel the weather too: they squint in summer sun, shiver in the snow, hunch in the rain and yawn late at night. With reduced motion turned on, the room keeps still.

The Week#

A planner grid and a tray of tasks. Drag a task into the week; fill a whole day, or the same hour across every day, and it clears. The week fills up the way real ones do, and the score is how much you fit. Tap a task (or twist two fingers) to turn it, and drop one on Hold to keep it for later.

It plays all seven days, with a lighter weekend. Workweek (Mon to Fri) is there if you would rather keep to the office week.

Table for Six#

A family dinner and a list of wishes: who wants to sit by whom, who needs the end of the table. Each wish sits beside the guest who made it, and the places it names light up. Pick a guest up and put them in a seat, or tap a guest and then a seat, until every wish holds. Fewer moves is better.

Each table allows a few undos, and an undone move still counts. A hint explains the reasoning rather than just making the move. The dinners get harder a step at a time, with one new kind of wish at once and an easier table now and then.

The room is laid out for the screen you play on. On a phone, each wish sits in a small bubble by the guest, and a tap on a guest shows the whole card. If you turn the phone on its side, Undo and Hint move into the corner so the table keeps the full height. On a tablet or a laptop the cards sit beside the guests. On a large monitor the wishes, the hints and what the guests say get bigger with the screen, so you can read them from your chair. The same layout can look different from one dinner to the next: the room may be turned around and the tablecloth changes, but every left and right still means what it says.

Paper Plane#

Press and hold to throw, and keep holding to lift the nose. Let go to glide. To put the nose down, slide the held finger (or the held mouse) down, and slide it back up to lift again; on a keyboard it is Down or S. The plane rides the warm air rising where the pages turn. Land on the red line, and the distance is the number to beat.

Loose Ends#

A cork board of pins and threads. Drag the pins until no two threads cross. Each board is a little bigger than the last.

The classics#

Stack#

A crane, a pile of cards and your character at the foot of it. The crane swings a card over the pile and one press drops it straight down. If it hangs over the edge, the overhang is trimmed off and the next card is only as wide as what is left. Land it right on top and it stays whole, and a few perfect drops in a row grow a narrowed card back. The ruler down the side marks your best height.

Five ways to play Stack

Zen

a miss only costs the card.

Blueprint

match a drawing by dropping off-center on purpose.

Tower

ends on the first miss.

Tall order

a height to reach before your third miss.

Against the clock

ninety seconds, with a second back for every perfect drop.

Index cards come first, then sticky notes and books as your towers grow. The first time you play, the game shows you how as you go.

Catch the Tasks#

The room that was here first, rebuilt. Tasks fall from the top of the page and you catch them in a board column: plain tasks, priority ones worth more, sticky notes that flutter, meetings that drop fast, and the odd notification ping you are better off letting fall.

Three powers that turn up now and then

Focus

slows everything down.

Inbox zero

drops every task on the page into your column.

Delegate

brings a second column to help.

Calm ways to play include A day (sixty tasks, catch what you can), Rain, Sort and Two baskets; Against the clock and Three misses are the competitive ones. It follows your theme, like every other game. Steer with the arrow keys on a keyboard or a drag on a phone.

Volley#

Two of the cast on a court with a net, playing real volleyball. The ball is in play until it touches the floor. If it lands in a court, the other side scores; if it lands out, or hits a wall, the ceiling or anything off the court, the side that touched it last loses the point. Each side gets up to three touches, so you can pass it to yourself, set it and hit it over, and you can run off your own court to save a ball that is still in the air.

The shot the game thinks is right is written over your character: a bump, a set, a spike by the net, a block at their hit. One press plays it. Add a direction to pick another shot.

Every touch is graded Perfect, Early or Late, so you can see your timing improve. On a phone held upright, the court is framed for portrait, and the camera eases across the court as the ball crosses rather than cutting.

Serving. A tap is the safe serve, high to the middle of their court. Hold it and a meter fills over your character, naming the serve you would get if you let go now: a float serve that drops short, a serve to the middle, then a drive serve, flat, fast and deep.

Blocking. When their spiker goes up at the net and you are close to it, the line over the court says their spike is coming. Press then and your character steps to the tape and jumps with their hit, hands up. A press after the ball is already struck is usually too late, as it is in real volleyball.

Help on the way. You always do the steering, but when you take your character close to a ball it could reach, it steps in under it instead of letting it drop behind. Easy helps from furthest away and Hard not at all. When a match ends, both players stop where they are and the result is marked on your character.

Three levels

Easy

your character runs to the ball, steps in under one you steer close to, and keeps up one you miss, against a relaxed opponent. A beginner can win here.

Normal

you do the running and every touch is yours, with a small step in under a ball you steer close to.

Hard

you have to be closer to the ball, and the opponent reads you.

Every character has the same body and plays as well as the others; they differ in how they like to play and in what they say.

Ways to play Volley

Lesson

(calm): five short steps, serve, pass and spike with one press, then a high set and a tip. N skips a step.

Rally

(calm): you and a partner keep it going together.

Spike practice

(calm): fifteen easy feeds to put on chalk circles.

Match

the quick game, one set to 11, won by two, with a count of your wins in a row.

Official

beach volleyball as it is refereed. Best of three sets to 21, 21 and 15, each won by two, and the players change ends every 7 points (every 5 in the third set), with the court turning around and each score staying over its player.

King of the court

short games to 5 against the rest of the cast, one after another.

Two players

both of you on one screen, left side against right, first to 9. On a keyboard the left player has A, D, W, S and Space, the right the arrows and Enter.

Today's court

the same match for everyone today.

In Match and Official, the side that wins a rally serves the next, a block counts as one of your three touches, and a serve that clips the net and carries over is in play. Double contact on a set is too fine to judge in the game, so it is never called. King of the court, Two players and Today's court keep their first-to-9 (or 5) games with the rally winner serving and a block as a free touch. Each way of playing shows its rules in one line on the card where you pick it.

There are five courts: the paper court, a school gym, a beach, a rooftop and a park.

How the characters play#

The characters in the games think for themselves. Each one has a personality drawn from its own temperament, so one likes to attack and another plays it safe, and each makes the kind of small mistakes a person makes rather than playing perfectly.

They also learn how you play: where you like to hit, whether a deep ball or a short one gives you trouble, which days of The Week you fill first. What they learn is a few dozen numbers per game, kept with your games settings on your account, so the characters on your phone know what the ones on your laptop picked up. Older habits fade, so last week counts for more than three months ago.

Within the level you pick, a game keeps the contest close. If you are winning every point it leans a little harder, and if you are losing every point it eases off. It only moves inside a narrow band around your level: Easy stays easy and Hard stays hard. Modes that promise a fair fight, where a best score is at stake, play exactly at the level you chose.

When you are online, a character's lines and its plan for a match can come from Margin Intelligence. Those answers are shared and reused for everyone, never built from anything you typed, and they do not count against your AI actions. Offline, or if that is slow, the characters think on the device and the game plays the same.

Extras on the phone#

The phone app adds a few things on top of the touch controls, never in place of them. Each one has its own switch in the game's settings sheet, and every game plays fully by touch with all of them off.

• Tilt steers by tilting the phone.
• Shake does the game's shake, where it has one.
• Paper that moves shifts the page a little as you tilt the phone.
• Haptics gives a small tap in your hand on every snap and landing.
• Two fingers lets you twist or pinch.

With Reduce Motion on, the motion extras stay still. When a round ends, Share on the result card sends the result as a picture.

Your best, everywhere#

Every game keeps your best scores and stars on your account, so a best you set on your phone is the one to beat on your laptop. Each way of playing has a best of its own. Two devices never lower each other's score: the higher one always wins. No game has a leaderboard, and nobody else can see your scores.

Sound#

The games have their own sounds, and they follow your sound setting in Settings→Notifications. If sounds are off for your account, the games are quiet too. Each game also has its own sound switch, which mutes only the device you are on. A game's sounds download the first time you play it, and after that it plays with sound offline. Most sounds have several takes that take turns, so a hit you hear forty times a round rarely sounds the same twice.

Music#

Each game has its own music, written for it: two to four longer pieces that change with where you play and the time of day. Volley's rooftop gets a relaxed groove under string lights, the café in The Week gets evening jazz, and Loose Ends turns quieter after dark. When a piece has played through, the next one in the set takes over, so you rarely hear the same one twice in a row. A shared library of other pieces comes around now and then too, for variety.

Between rounds, on the start card, the level picker and the result, a short piece of the game's own plays instead, and the longer music comes back when the round starts. The music sits under the room and the game's own sounds, and it drops back and softens while a menu is open.

The music also follows the match. As a rally gets longer, a clock runs down, a stack gets taller or a flight goes on, the piece opens up and gets a little brighter and a little louder. It never cuts to another piece in the middle of a round. When a round ends, the music rises into the moment and then settles back down. On the phone the music gets a little louder but its tone stays the same.

The shelf, where you pick a game, has quiet music of its own. It only starts after you tap or press something there. It changes with the time of day. When you open a game it keeps playing, softly, under the game's menu, and fades out once the game's own music has started, so there is no silent gap between them. The Music switch next to Skip openings turns it off. In the browser it is the same switch as the one in each game, so turning it off on the shelf turns game music off on that device too. On the phone each game keeps its own music switch, and the shelf has its own as well.

To choose, open the pause menu (or the game's place settings) and pick under Music:

• Adaptive follows the place, the hour and the season. This is the default.
• A named piece plays that one for as long as you play, menus included. Every piece in every game is on the list, not only the game's own.
• Off plays no music in this game. The other games keep theirs.

Your pick is saved for each game on your account, so your phone and your laptop play the same thing. On the phone the same choice is in the game's settings sheet, under Sound. A piece downloads the first time it plays. The music switch beside the sound switch still turns music off in every game on the device you are on.

Five minutes#

A break is five minutes, and that is not a setting. The room counts down and tells you where you came from, so the way out is the way back to the thing you were doing rather than a decision you have to make again.

Why a productivity app ships games#

Because breaks are part of work, and a break that stays inside the app is one you actually come back from. Five minutes with a small puzzle resets your head better than five minutes of a feed designed to keep you.

Nothing is wired to them. No reward, no daily streak to protect, no notifications, and no effect on your data at all.

Where it lives#

The gamepad icon in the top bar, on every surface, or Take a break from the command palette. In the phone app, Take a break is in the Margin Intelligence sheet and on the Focus screen. In a phone browser the games play in portrait with touch controls, fit the screen without scrolling, and a drag in a game never scrolls or refreshes the page. On a large monitor every game grows with the screen: the board, the characters, the room around them and every word get bigger together, so a 1440p or 4K screen is filled the way a laptop's is and everything reads from your chair. Every game also works with a keyboard.