Basketball — a free sixty-second shooting game in your browser

Drag back from the ball and release. The further you drag, the harder the shot; the angle of the drag is the angle of the throw. Gravity, the rim and the backboard do the rest. You get sixty seconds and one point a basket.

The hoop stands still until you have scored five, and then it starts sliding, a little faster with every basket. Free, no download, no sign-up, and it plays the same with a thumb as with a mouse.

How to play

• Drag from the ball in the direction you want it to go, then let go. A longer drag is a harder throw.
• The guide line shows the direction and the power while you drag, so the first shot is not a guess.
• Use the backboard. A ball off the board drops almost straight down, which is a much bigger target than the rim.
• Once you reach 5 points the hoop starts moving, and it speeds up from there.
• On a desktop you can also aim with the arrow keys and shoot with space.
• Your score is baskets in 60 seconds, and your top 5 is kept on this device.

Why the ball has to be going down for it to count

The single thing that makes a homemade basketball game feel wrong is the rim. Most of them treat the hoop as a rectangle and award a point the moment the ball is inside it, which means a ball rattling upward through the net scores. Everyone notices, even if they cannot say why.

Here the rim is two small circles, one at each end, and a basket needs two things at once: the ball must cross the line between them, and it must be travelling downward when it does. That single direction test is the difference between a hoop and a hole. It is also why a shot that comes up under the rim and pops out is a miss rather than a gift.

The two rim circles are real obstacles as well. Clip the near one and the ball comes back toward you, because you have hit the front of a round object and bounced off its face. Clip the far one and you get the shooter's favourite outcome: the ball is deflected down and inward, into the hoop. That is not a special case in the code, it is just what bouncing off a circle does, and it is exactly why coaches tell you to aim long. Aim for the back of the rim. The geometry is on your side there and against you at the front.

The backboard is the other thing worth learning. A ball that hits the board loses most of its horizontal speed and drops nearly vertically, which turns a narrow horizontal target into a wide one. It is a less elegant shot and a far more reliable one, and in a sixty-second game reliability is the whole score.

One last piece of arithmetic. Because the hoop only starts moving at five points, the opening seconds are the cheapest baskets you will get all game. Take the straightforward shot early rather than practising the fancy one — the difficulty is waiting for you either way.

More games

More from 🕹️ Arcade & one-tap games:

• Cup Pong — Flick a ball down the table into a ten-cup rack. A bounce still counts, and it is the easier shot.
• Archery — Ten arrows at a ten-ring target. Every arrow leaves at the same speed, so reading the gust is the whole game.
• Baseball — Ten pitches, one tap each. Timing alone decides where the ball goes and how far it carries.
• Fruit Slice — Swipe to cut the fruit and miss the bombs. Several in one stroke pays the square, so timing beats speed.
• Fishing — Cast, strike when the float dips, then reel — but let go the moment the fish runs, or the line snaps.

Or browse all games.