Unblock Poki and open the game grid in your browser

Your browser talks to TrickyBird, and TrickyBird is what talks to Poki. It fetches the page, rewrites the HTML, the CSS and the JavaScript so every link, image and later request points back through its own address, and leaves a service worker behind in the tab to catch whatever loads after that. On both games we opened, that service worker was in control of the page, which is the part that counts once a game starts pulling its own files.

A Poki game then runs in a single frame on that page, and the canvas it draws on lives inside that frame. It is a shorter path than some game portals take. CrazyGames stacks a loader frame and an engine frame before the game itself appears, and every extra frame is another thing that has to survive the trip. Poki asks less of a proxy for that reason.

Stickman Hook and Retro Bowl, and the pair was picked to be unlike each other rather than typical. Stickman Hook loads a plain canvas bundle with no named engine behind it. Retro Bowl is a GameMaker build, a different renderer that fetches its assets a different way. A canvas game is mostly one large script and a pile of files it pulls in afterwards, so what it asks of a proxy is that every one of those fetches comes back rewritten and none of them slips out to the original address. When both come through, what has been shown is a proxy carrying a canvas game, rather than one studio’s particular setup happening to survive.

Both painted a real picture instead of a blank rectangle or a loader that never moves, and neither engine threw the kind of error that means it gave up partway. Running the set twice in a day and getting the same answer is worth less than it sounds, though. It was 2 games, on 1 computer, in 1 day.

Retro Bowl opens on a tutorial dialog with a CONTINUE button, and the engine paints that button onto the canvas instead of putting it in the page, so an automated click has nothing to aim at. The game loads and draws; whether a match plays through from there is not something this check reached.

Poki does not serve a game from a single place. The page arrives from one address and the game’s own files arrive from several others that belong to Poki, and every one of those was watched: none of them was reached directly from your browser. Poki sees a connection from TrickyBird rather than from you, and your network sees a connection to TrickyBird with nothing in it to say which site is on the far end.

To run the service and curb abuse, the edge keeps a short access log: a shortened form of your IP address, the hostname of the site you connected to, and basic response details, kept for at most 48 hours, with no TrickyBird account for any of it to attach to.