Arcade turns Claude Code into a small workspace: task boards where one button hands a card to Claude, a notebook Claude keeps with you, a calendar, team chats, and something to do while the agent works. It's a free, open-source plugin for the terminal, VS Code and Claude Desktop, on Windows, macOS and Linux.

What's inside:

• Boards. Columns (To do / Doing / Done or your own) and cards; a card is a page with text and a checklist. Every card has a "Give to Claude" button. If Claude is free, it starts right away; if it's busy, the card waits in the prompt box until you send it. Claude ticks off what's done and writes the result back on the card.

• Notebook. Pages and checklists kept on your computer. Claude reads and edits them through Arcade's own MCP tool, which deletes nothing, and if you don't like an edit, you can restore the text from before it. All open Claude Code sessions share it, so each session can take its own card from one board.

• Calendar. One line adds an event: "fri 9:30 standup", "tomorrow 15:00 call". Each event gets a color and a reminder, which comes as a system notification while Claude Code is open. Claude has its own calendar tool, so you can just ask "what do I have tomorrow?". Like the notebook, it's shared by all sessions. It's local for now and doesn't sync with Google or Apple calendars.

• Team. Optional GitHub sign-in: Arcade gets only your profile name and picture. Share a board with up to 20 people; changes show up within seconds. Chat one-on-one or in groups. On Windows a new message pops up in the bottom-left corner on top of all your windows without stealing focus; on macOS and Linux it's a system notification.

• The wait. After 10 seconds of agent work, a small "play?" appears above the prompt. Press 1, and a NES game opens right inside Claude Code. The moment Claude finishes or asks for permission, a banner appears over the game: "Back to agent" or "Keep playing". Also inside: 61 free, openly licensed games, public-domain books and LibriVox audiobooks in 30 languages, and fresh articles, podcasts and videos on whatever the agent is working on. Don't need it? Hide those sections and turn the "play?" line off; boards, notes and chats stay.

Install (Claude Code 2.1.275 or newer), in a terminal:

claude plugin marketplace add ArbakovMaxim/agent-arcade

claude plugin install arcade@agent-arcade

Then /arcade opens the menu.

13 interface languages. No ads, no analytics, no tracking. AGPL-3.0. Shared boards and chats are stored on Arcade's server and are not encrypted; the privacy policy says what it keeps and for how long.

It's a beta, and most of the code was written with Claude Code. Bug reports and blunt feedback are very welcome.