Building a Free Gaming Studio: The Cliko Games Story

I started with a Sudoku game as a proof of concept. It worked. So I kept building.

Why Sudoku First

The first game I built for Cliko was Sudoku. Not because it's the most exciting — because it was the right proof of concept. If I could build a Sudoku game that played well on every device, had 7 difficulty levels, generated daily challenges, and ran as a single HTML file under 200KB, I could build anything.

It worked. So I kept building. And the more I built, the more I discovered. I got bored of Spider Solitaire and researched alternatives — that led me to Basra, Briscola, Scopa, and the entire Mediterranean card game tradition. Building Cliko turned me into an accidental historian. Every country has a card game. Most of them aren't online. I'm fixing that.

The casual gaming industry is broken. Mobile apps are designed to frustrate you into paying. Energy timers, loot boxes, unskippable ads every 30 seconds. The games I grew up with — Minesweeper, Solitaire, the card games my family played on weekends in Mysuru — were honest. You got the full game. I wanted to build that experience for the browser.

What We're Building

Cliko Games is a solo operation based in Toronto. Over 150 games across 12 genres, every one a single HTML file. No downloads, no accounts, no predatory monetization. I play my own games an hour every day — Sudoku, Canasta, and Poker (I donate the poker earnings — they're haraam).

Our Global Games collection brings traditional card games from 15+ countries to the browser for the first time. These are games played by millions daily but invisible to English speakers. I found them through research, got fascinated by their mechanics and histories, and built them with original rules — not simplified versions.

All advice is welcome, and all of it gets considered. I work from anywhere — home, coffee shops, the subway with crappy service. The goal is the same as day one: build the world's best free gaming platform, one game at a time. Visit clikogames.com to play.

What's Next

Regional games from Saudi Arabia, Germany, Japan, and India are in the pipeline. Educational partnerships for classroom use. Platform expansion to reach millions of new players. We add new games every week. The vision is simple: thousands of free games, millions of returning players, all built on the idea that great games don't need to cost anything.