Here’s a small, annoying ritual most of us in Singapore have performed at least once.
It’s a Saturday. It’s raining, or it’s 34 degrees, which amounts to the same problem. You have a bored eight-year-old, or a date you’d like to impress, or six friends in a group chat who have said “up to you leh” nine times in a row. So you type “things to do in Singapore” into your phone.
And you get… listicles. 37 Things To Do In Singapore This Weekend. Half of them are ads. A third of them closed in 2023. Two of them are the same place with different photos. Nobody tells you what’s actually open right now, whether it’s a fifteen-minute walk from the MRT, or whether bringing a toddler there is a good idea or a hostage situation.
That’s the itch. arcades.SG is us scratching it.
What this actually is
It’s a directory. Not a magazine, not a blog empire, not a countdown of 50 things you MUST do before you die.
Right now there are 180 venues across 23 categories — arcades, escape rooms, karaoke, bowling, indoor playgrounds, self-photo studios, VR, laser tag, indoor climbing, trampoline parks, board game cafés, cat cafés, art jamming, karting, and a few things that don’t fit neatly anywhere.
The useful part isn’t the list. It’s the filters.
Who’s playing? Family, Date, Friends, Team, Tourist. Pick one and the whole site rearranges itself around that. A date-night filter doesn’t show you a ball pit. A family filter doesn’t send you to a horror escape room with jump scares.
What’s open right now? There’s a live Open now view that checks opening hours against the actual time. Useful at 9.40pm on a Tuesday when you’re deciding whether it’s worth the trip.
Where, and how much? Central, East, West, North, North-East, Sentosa. Budget, mid, premium. Indoor or outdoor — which, during monsoon season, is the only filter that matters.
Every listing gives you the boring-but-essential stuff on one screen: usual hours, address, nearest MRT station, phone number, website, and a directions link. No scrolling past 800 words of preamble to find out where the place is.
And a small thing we’re quietly proud of: the filters are plain links, so they work even with JavaScript off, on bad 4G, on an old phone. The site is built to be fast on a phone while you’re standing on a platform at Bugis, because that’s when people actually use it.
The honest bit
We’d rather say this on day one than have you find out the hard way.
We cannot promise everything here is accurate.
Venues change their hours. Venues move. Venues quietly close and leave the signage up. Prices go up. That new outlet at the mall opened last week and we don’t know about it yet. Ratings shown on listings are summarised from publicly available review data at the time we imported it — they’re a rough signal of “is this place decent,” not a live number, and they’re not reviews collected by us.
So: always check with the venue before you make the trip, especially for anything that needs a booking, and especially if you’re hauling kids or a group across the island.
What we will do is keep it honest. Every single listing has a “Something wrong with this listing?” form at the bottom. Moved, closed, wrong hours, wrong price bracket — tell us and we’ll check it. It takes about twenty seconds and it makes the site better for the next person standing in the rain outside a shuttered unit.
If you run a venue, that same form lets you claim your listing. It’s free. You know your opening hours better than we ever will.
What’s coming
This is version one, and it looks like version one in places. On the list:
- More venues. 180 is a start, not a finish. Singapore has more fun in it than that.
- Better maps. There’s a map view now; it’s going to get considerably better.
- Proper guides. Rainy day rescues, cheap dates, birthday parties that don’t end in tears, tourist-with-four-hours-to-kill. Curated by humans who’ve actually been.
- Sharper “open now.” Public holidays, school holidays, last-entry times, seasonal closures.
- Bookings. Where it makes sense, getting you from “that looks good” to “we’re going” without a detour.
We’ll keep the whole thing free to browse. Some listings will be featured or sponsored, and when they are, we’ll say so.
Go play
That’s the whole pitch: pick who you’re bringing, see what’s open, go.
Browse everything → · Open right now → · Family → · Date →
Found something wrong? Found something great we’ve missed? Tell us. We’re building this in public and we’d genuinely rather be corrected than be confidently wrong.
See you at the claw machine.
— The arcades.SG team