Sittings, screens and where your progress lives

A quick visit or a long evening

Tiny Fishing and Coin Picker reward small helpings: a couple of minutes, a couple of upgrades, tab closed. Candy Riddles and Fortune Match break naturally into levels, so you can agree a number with yourself before starting.

Arcade Casino Tycoon is the evening game of the five. Its progress builds slowly, and anything under twenty minutes tends to feel unfinished.

In a pocket

Games drawn for a tall screen travel best. On our phones, Candy Riddles and Coin Picker were the easiest to play with one thumb.

• Close idle tabs first: a phone browser shares a small pool of memory between them
• If the address bar covers part of the board, switch the browser to full screen
• After the first visit data use is light, though that first load can run to several megabytes

On a tablet

Matching boards are at their happiest on a tablet, where every piece is a generous target. Arcade Casino Tycoon accepts both orientations, so landscape works well for it.

At a desk

Any up-to-date desktop browser will open all five. Keyboard fans should try Arcade Casino Tycoon, steered entirely by WASD or the arrows, and Coin Picker, where the Space bar hurries the picks along.

Sluggish game? Look in your browser settings for hardware acceleration. Most browsers enable it out of the box, but it is occasionally switched off.

Being offline, and keeping your place

All five need an internet connection to start. Tiny Fishing keeps adding to your earnings while it is closed, but you still have to come back online to collect them.

CrazyGames stores progress for these titles. A CrazyGames login is what carries it from one device to the next; play signed out and a browser clean-up may wipe it.

Music and battery

Most of these games start with a soundtrack. Silence the tab itself rather than the whole phone, and your messages will still chime. For a long sitting on battery, dim the screen and close background apps; the difference is easy to notice.