Air Hockey — free online game against the computer

Drag your mallet around your half of the table and knock the puck past the computer. First to seven goals takes the match. The puck keeps its speed off the side walls, and when you strike it the mallet's own movement is added to the bounce — so a mallet sitting still barely returns the puck, while one moving into it sends it away hard. That single rule is the whole game.

Your score is your match win streak. Every match you take, the computer moves faster and reads the puck's path further ahead, so the fifth opponent is a genuinely different player from the first. Lose a match and the run ends. It is free, needs no download, and the table is portrait so a phone works one-handed.

How to play

• Drag anywhere in your half to move your mallet. It cannot cross the halfway line.
• Hit the puck while moving — your mallet's speed is added to the puck's.
• First to seven goals wins the match. Your score is consecutive match wins.
• The puck bounces off the side walls but not the ends, where the goals are.
• Each match you win makes the opponent faster and better at predicting.

Why standing still loses, and why chasing loses faster

The physics here rewards a very specific habit. When the puck meets your mallet, the outgoing speed depends on how fast the mallet is travelling into it. Park your mallet in the puck's path and it will simply bounce off gently, straight back to the middle where the computer is waiting. Swing into the puck as it arrives and you get a genuine shot. So the correct motion is not a block, it is a short strike timed to meet the puck.

The opposite error is more expensive. Chasing the puck up the table feels aggressive, but every moment your mallet is out of position is a moment your goal is undefended, and the computer's returns come back fast enough that you will not get home. The reliable pattern is to hold a position just in front of your goal, let the puck come to you, and strike as it arrives — attacking and defending with the same movement rather than choosing between them.

Angles are the third tool. The side walls are perfect reflectors, so a puck struck diagonally into a wall arrives at the far side of the opposing goal, which is exactly where a mallet sitting in the middle cannot reach. Straight shots are what the computer is best at reading, and as its prediction improves with your streak, the bank shot off the wall becomes the only reliable way through. If you like the same one-paddle geometry, Pong is the ancestor of this whole idea.

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