About Barrelhead
Barrelhead is a place to play classic board games against the computer: checkers, backgammon, shut the box, farkle, yatzy, reversi, mancala, chinese checkers, nine men's morris and tic-tac-toe so far. It is free, there is no account, and there is nothing to download. A game you leave is where you left it when you come back.
Who makes it
Barrelhead is made in Stockholm by Hydral Media AB, a Swedish company with company number 559139-5545. The company is responsible for the site and what is on it.
The games are free and are meant to stay free, paid for by advertising once that starts. The privacy page says what that will mean, and what the site stores and counts today.
How the boards are made
Nothing on the boards is a photograph, and nothing is a generated picture. Every barrel head, board, piece, stone, die and shadow is computed by a program written for this site.
The program has a description of each thing instead of a picture of it: the planks of the barrel head and the grain of the oak, the paint and where years of play have worn it off, the turned profile of a checker, the curve of a glass stone, and one lamp above and to the left. For every point in a picture it works out which surface is there, how the light from the lamp falls on it, and what color that makes.
Everything is seen from the same angle, from above and a little toward you, so a flat board keeps its shape while the height of a piece still shows. Shadows are cast from the same lamp, which is why a king, being two pieces high, throws a longer shadow than a single piece.
The pieces you move are separate small pictures made the same way, in the same light, and laid over the board. The chalk rings and dots that mark your moves are drawn by the page.
How the computer opponents are built
Each game has its own engine, written for this site. The engines for checkers, reversi, mancala, Chinese checkers, nine men's morris and tic-tac-toe look ahead: they try their moves, your answers and their answers to those, and score what they find. The backgammon engine scores every way of playing a roll, and at its two highest levels it also runs through the rolls you could throw next. In shut the box, farkle and Yatzy there is no board to look ahead on. There the engine works out what each choice is worth on average over every way the dice can fall next, and at full strength it takes the one worth the most. All of them run in your browser, on your own device.
The rules in each engine are checked against a second, deliberately plain version of the same rules, written straight from the rule text, to see that the two always allow the same moves. Where published figures exist they are checked against those as well. The checkers engine finds exactly the published number of ways the first ten moves of a game can go, five by each side: 18,391,564.
How the levels are measured
Every game has five levels. They are set by playing them against each other, from forty to a thousand games for each step, until each level beats the one below it clearly but not every time. The lowest levels make mistakes on purpose. The highest do not.
The results, with the number of games behind them, are on each game's page: checkers, backgammon, shut the box, farkle, yatzy, reversi, mancala, chinese checkers, nine men's morris and tic-tac-toe.
Get in touch
Write to hello@barrelhead.games. If a rule on this site is wrong, a level does something odd, or a game misbehaves in your browser, that is the address to tell.
This page was last changed on 9 October 2026.