Aeroplane wifi is either expensive, fictional, or both. Same for the underground, long train journeys through anywhere hilly, and most hospital waiting rooms.
Our games work without a connection, and you do not need an app store to get them. This is how, plus what to actually play once you are up there.
Two minutes before you leave
The site is a progressive web app, which is a technical way of saying your phone can keep a copy of it.
On iPhone or iPad: open gamedavinci.com in Safari, tap the share button, choose Add to Home Screen.
On Android: open the site in Chrome and either accept the install prompt, or use the menu → Install app / Add to Home Screen.
That gives you an icon that opens without browser chrome. More importantly, the game files are now stored on the device.
The one step people miss: open each game you plan to play, once, before you lose signal. The game bundle is cached when it is first loaded — the shell of the site being installed does not by itself pull down all 76 games. Thirty seconds of tapping through your five favourites while you still have wifi is the whole trick.
What to load for a long flight
The requirement for a flight is different from a bus ride. You have hours, not minutes, and nothing to interrupt you. That means you want games that get harder as you go, not games that end.
Sudoku and Nonogram — the obvious two, and they earn it. Both generate boards on the device rather than downloading them, so "no signal" does not mean "no new puzzles". Nonogram is the picture-logic one where numbers along the edges tell you which cells to fill; if you have never tried it, start here.
Bridgework — Hashiwokakero. Genuinely difficult at the top of its ladder, and it generates in about four milliseconds, so you will not run out.
Prism Sort — for the stretch of the flight where you want to be occupied rather than challenged. It also shows you the shortest finish still available from wherever you have got to, which turns an easy game into a quiet efficiency contest.
FreeCell — almost every deal is winnable, which makes it the right solitaire for a long sitting. Spider if you want the harder one, Klondike if you want the one you already know.
2048 — one thumb, no reading, indefinitely repeatable.
Unjam — if you want something that will actually stop you. The sliding-block puzzle is one of the few genres we have measured that resists a simple strategy.
The one honest caveat
Daily puzzles need a date, not a connection — and that mostly works fine offline, because your device knows the date. What will not work is anything that has to reach our servers: leaderboards, and syncing your streak across devices.
Your streak is stored locally, so it survives the flight. It just will not appear on another device until you are back online.
Everything else — 76 games, every generator, every difficulty ladder — runs entirely on your device. There is no server doing the thinking.
Why they work offline at all
Not a virtue we invented; it is a consequence of how the games are built.
Each game is a self-contained bundle: its own HTML, its own logic, no framework loaded from someone else's CDN, no analytics vendor, no ad network. There is nothing to phone home to, which means there is nothing to fail when the phone cannot.
The puzzles are generated on the device too. A Sudoku board is not fetched, it is built — and the same is true for Kakuro, Nonogram, Shikaku, Star Battle and the rest. We spent real effort making those generators fast enough to run at play time rather than shipping pre-made puzzle files, which had a side effect we did not initially plan for: there is nothing to download, so there is nothing to be missing.
If you are interested in that side of it, we wrote up how we deleted our puzzle bank and why we stopped aiming at unique puzzles.
Before you close the laptop
Open the catalogue, pick five, load each one once. That is the entire preparation.
Free, no store, no account, no ads — on the plane or off it.
