Cup Pong — a free flick-and-sink game in your browser

A rack of ten cups at the far end of the table and a ball in your hand. Drag back and release: the direction of the drag is the direction of the throw, the length of it is the power. Sink a cup and it is removed. Clear the whole rack and the next one is set up further away.

You start with five balls and a miss costs one, so a run ends when you run out. Clearing a rack gives two back. Free, no download, no sign-up.

How to play

• Drag back from the ball and let go. Longer drag, longer throw.
• The ball's shadow shows how high it is — when the ball meets its shadow, it has landed.
• A bounce still counts. A ball that lands short and hops into a cup is a legal shot and always has been.
• A miss costs one ball. Sinking a cup costs nothing, and clearing the rack gives you two back.
• On a desktop you can aim with the arrow keys and throw with space.
• Your score is total cups sunk, and your top 5 is kept on this device.

The bounce shot is thrown short, and it is the easier shot

Every version of this game allows a bounce, and it is worth understanding rather than just using. A ball thrown directly has to arrive inside a cup mouth on the way down, along a steep path. A ball thrown short, so that it hits the table first, arrives at the cups flatter and slower, and the bounce scrubs about a third of its speed on the way.

The first thing that surprises people is which throw is harder. Measured across the whole power range against a fresh rack, the band of throws that sink directly is noticeably narrower than the band that sinks after a bounce — the bounce shot is the more forgiving one, which is exactly why some house rules make it worth two cups. The second surprise is that the bounce shot needs less power, not more. It is a deliberately short throw, and if you approach it by adding power to a direct shot you will sail over the rack every time.

The other thing worth knowing is where to aim, and it is not at a cup. Aim at the middle of the cluster. A rack is packed tightly enough that the gaps between cups are smaller than a cup mouth, so a ball landing in a gap is usually deflected into one of the cups on either side. Aiming at a specific cup on the edge of the rack gives you one target with empty table on one side of it; aiming at the middle gives you a target several cups wide.

That advantage shrinks as you clear the rack, which is the quiet difficulty curve underneath the obvious one. Ten cups is a wide, forgiving cluster. Three cups is three separate targets with gaps between them, and the last cup is exactly as small as it looks — while sitting further away than the first one did.

More games

More from 🕹️ Arcade & one-tap games:

• 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.
• Curling — Slide eight stones down the ice. A light one curls; a hard one takes theirs out.

Or browse all games.