About Thumbprint School

Thumbprint School is a small arcade of free browser games, every one of them pressed from clay. There is nothing to install and no account to make: pick a tile, press your thumb into the clay, and play. The games run on phones, on laptops and on the kind of locked-down office computer that cannot install anything, because each one is a plain web page that asks for nothing beyond a browser.

Why clay

Every game here shares one look. The characters, the walls, the cars and the monsters are sculpted from real-looking clay: matte, fingerprinted, a little lumpy, lit like a stop-motion film set. Things move in steps, twelve frames a second, the way a clay figure moves when someone nudges it between photographs. When a character jumps it squashes and stretches; when it lands it leaves a print. The look is deliberately handmade and deliberately grown-up: dark studio lighting, editorial type, no cartoon gloss.

The Kiln

Clay has one enemy, and so does every game on the site. The Kiln is the villain that threads through the arcade: the heat that fires soft clay hard and makes it brittle. Its work shows up as glazed, crazed, slightly-too-shiny ceramic. In one game it is a row of glazed bricks that ring when struck; in another it is a pool of heat under the shelves; in the bigger games it is the figure in the white glazed jacket who always turns up when something good is about to happen. Your job, whatever the game, is to keep the clay soft.

What is here

The shelf holds quick classics (a maze chase, a road crossing, a platformer, a ball-and-paddle game, a match-three puzzle), a driving game on a pseudo-3D coast road, and two story games played entirely by typing: a long night with an old typewriter, and a high-school driving club told in over-the-top animated storyboards. A separate 3D shelf, for browsers with WebGL, holds a typing game against a giant clay monster. Each game has its own page under Games explaining what it is and how to play it.

Who makes it

Thumbprint School is made by one person, Daniel Feldman, with help from code and image tools, as a personal project that grew into a public site. The games, their characters, their names and their art are original. The site uses no third-party scripts or fonts in its games, keeps the bundles small, and loads nothing it does not need.

Safe by construction

The arcade is written to be safe for anyone who wanders in. Nothing a player types or draws is ever shown publicly. Scores are the only thing kept about a guest, and a guest is anonymous. The in-game messaging system, Clay Mail, exists only behind a PIN, holds a message for 48 hours, and is reachable only through terminals inside the games. Games rated for older players stay off the shelf unless an adult account asks for them. The full details are in the privacy policy.

Get in touch

Found a bug, a typo or a game that will not start on your machine? Write to privacy@thumbprint.school with the game's name and what you saw; the same address answers questions about your data.