Drag to move, tap to launch
Drag to move, tap to launch
Two paddles, one ball. Return a computer opponent's shots for as long as you can while the ball speeds up with every hit you make — one miss ends the run.
Your paddle is the blue one at the bottom; the bot plays the red paddle at the top. Press Start and the ball is served toward you from the middle of the court. Touch or drag anywhere on the court to steer — your paddle centres itself under your finger at once, and only your finger's left–right position matters.
Each time the ball bounces off your paddle you score one rally point, shown by the Rally counter. The run ends the first time the ball gets past your paddle; there are no extra lives. If the bot misses, nothing is lost: after a half-second pause the ball is served to you again from the middle, and your count carries on.
The ball starts at 280 pixels per second and gains 14 with every return you make, until it levels off at 620 after 25 returns. On a typical phone a straight ball takes about two seconds to cross the court at first and under one second at full speed. The side walls bounce the ball back without slowing it.
Where the ball meets your paddle sets the return angle: dead centre sends it straight up, and the further from centre it lands the wider the angle it flies at, up to about 57 degrees from straight at the very ends. The ball counts as hit if any part of it touches the 80-pixel paddle. The bot's paddle follows the same rule, but it can move no faster than 240 pixels per second.
Your best rally is kept on this device, and the game-over card lets you save the run to the Hall of Fame.
Goal: keep the rally going as long as you can.
The crucial quirk here is that only your side can lose — if the bot misses, the ball is simply re-served to you. That means defence is everything: forget trying to "beat" the top paddle and focus entirely on never letting the ball slip past yours. Treat every rally as a survival drill, not a duel.
Control the angle with contact point: hit the ball with the edge of your paddle to send it sharply sideways, or with the centre to keep it straight and predictable when you need a breather. As the rally speeds up the ball gets harder to read, so position under its predicted path early and keep small movements rather than lunging. Drift back toward centre between hits, because a centred paddle can cover a ball heading to either corner.
Read the bot as well as the ball. Whenever the ball is served, the bot picks a random aiming offset of up to 22 pixels and keeps its paddle that far to one side of the ball until the next serve. While it keeps up, its returns therefore leave at much the same angle every time — anywhere from straight to about 33 degrees, depending on the offset it drew — so after two or three exchanges you know which way its shots lean and can be waiting there. Its 240-pixel-per-second limit matters too: from about 20 returns on, it misses roughly half of the balls you strike more than 25 pixels off centre, yet it almost always reaches balls hit within 15 pixels of the middle.
A bot miss costs you nothing, but weigh what comes next: the re-serve starts from the middle line, so it reaches you in roughly half the usual time, although it never comes in at more than 22.5 degrees — sit in the centre during the pause. Because only the horizontal position of your finger counts, keep your thumb low on the court, level with or below your paddle, where it never hides the incoming ball. The paddle also jumps straight under any new touch, so you can lift and press down where the ball will arrive instead of sliding across; just keep your thumb down during that pause. A fresh touch then starts the ball early in a random direction, and when the half second is up it is sent toward you again from wherever it has drifted to, at a new angle. And know where the ceiling is: after 25 returns the ball never gets faster, so from there on the run depends on repeating the same timing, not on adapting to more speed.