claude-arcade

claude-arcade opens a pane of retro games in Claude Code that run while Claude works and freeze the moment Claude needs you. Give Claude a task, play a round, and the game stops by itself when a permission prompt or a question appears, or when the turn ends. It is a separate project from cc-arcade, by a different author, and it is built around that pause.

What it does

• Five games. Bricks (ball and paddle, three lives, a faster ball after each cleared wall), Worm (faster every five bites), Merge (slide number tiles together toward the gold 2048 tile and past it), Mines (the first field you open is always safe) and Bulls & Cows (crack a four-digit code in ten tries).
• Automatic pause. The game runs once Claude starts on your prompt. It freezes when the main turn ends, while an AskUserQuestion dialog is open, and while a permission prompt waits, until the tool it was for has run. A subagent finishing does not stop it. A line under the field says why it stopped.
• Picking up again. Merge, Mines and Bulls & Cows move only on your keys, so a pause costs nothing. Bricks and Worm, frozen mid-play for a second or more, wait for P when Claude resumes, because your keyboard may still be at the prompt.
• Keys. Arrows (or WASD, HJKL) move, Space or Enter is the main action and restarts after game over, F or X flags a field in Mines, P pauses, Q goes back to the menu and Esc hands the keyboard back to the prompt. Letter keys also work on a Russian layout.
• High scores per game, kept across sessions. A running game’s record is saved every five seconds, so leaving with Q or closing the pane mid-game does not lose it.
• Settings, under /plugin → arcade → configure or in pluginConfigs.arcade in settings.json. language offers ten languages; auto follows Claude Code’s own language setting, then the system locale. glyphs can swap the block symbols for plain ascii, which auto picks for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, whose terminals often draw those symbols two cells wide. sound plays a short chime when a game freezes while the pane is open. It is macOS only and off by default.

Install

Needs Claude Code 2.1.287 or later.

claude plugin marketplace add Zaho92/claude-arcade
claude plugin install arcade@zaho92-arcade

Run /arcade. The menu opens inline above the prompt, or docked beside the transcript in fullscreen mode. Click into the pane, pick a game with ↑/↓ and Enter, and give Claude something to do. When the game freezes, press Esc, answer Claude, then click back into the pane.

How it works

The hooks only track when Claude stops to wait. turn.start and turn.complete follow the main turn, a tool.call hook on AskUserQuestion covers questions, and tool.check with the classic PermissionRequest hook tells when a permission prompt opens and when the call it was for ends. From those calls it reads the tool name, the call and agent IDs and the permission verdict, never the tool’s input, and it passes every call and decision on unchanged.

High scores are the only thing it stores, in Claude Code’s plugin store on your machine. At startup it reads your Claude Code settings and the locale variables only to pick a language. It makes no network calls, and your keys go straight to the pane, never through the model.

Limitations

• The author documents the Claude Code CLI in a terminal. The pane’s code also accepts the Desktop app’s Code tab, but the author does not say they tried it there. On mobile and in the VS Code extension the pane shows a note instead of the game.
• If the pane is narrower than the game’s field, the game waits and asks you to make the pane bigger.
• The nine translations besides English have had no native review, the author says.
• Version 1.0.1 of a hobby project published on 2 October 2026, written with Claude Code and reviewed by the author, who asks for reports of rough edges.