Fruit Slice — a free swipe-to-cut game in your browser

Fruit is thrown up from the bottom of the screen. Drag your finger through it and it is cut in half. Let three pieces fall and the run is over — and if your blade touches a bomb, it is over immediately.

The thing that turns it from a reflex test into a game is the scoring: cutting several fruit in one stroke pays the square of the number. One fruit is worth 1, but four in a single sweep is worth 16. Free, no download, no sign-up.

How to play

• Drag across the screen to swing the blade. It works with a finger or a held mouse button.
• Cut fruit, miss bombs. A bomb is black with a fuse and it ends the run on contact.
• Three dropped fruit ends the run too, so you cannot simply wait for easy groups.
• One stroke through four fruit scores 16, not 4. The combo is where every good score comes from.
• Your score is the total, and your top 5 is kept on this device.

Why the square, and why you should wait at the top

A linear score would make this game a test of how fast you can wave your hand. Squaring the combo changes the question completely: it stops being "can I hit everything" and becomes "when should I swing?". Four separate strokes through four fruit score four. One stroke through the same four scores sixteen. That is not a bonus, it is the entire scoring system, and everything else follows from it.

What follows first is patience, and it has a physical reason. Fruit thrown at the same moment is on the same kind of arc, and at the top of an arc a thrown object is barely moving vertically — all its speed has been traded for height and it has not yet been paid back. So a group launched together spreads out on the way up, hangs almost still for a beat near the apex, and then separates again on the way down. That still moment is the only time several fruit sit close enough to be crossed by one line, and it is the moment worth waiting for.

The second thing that follows is that the blade is a line, not a point. What matters is not where your finger is but the path it takes, so a long confident stroke through the middle of a group beats a short jab at the nearest fruit. It also means direction matters: three fruit at the apex are usually spread horizontally, so a flat sideways sweep catches all three where a vertical flick catches one.

And the third is that the bomb is a genuine trap rather than an obstacle. Once you are hunting groups you are drawing long strokes across crowded parts of the screen, which is exactly the behaviour that ends a run. The three-drop limit exists to stop the obvious counter-strategy: without it you could simply never swing when a bomb was on screen, and wait the danger out. With it, doing nothing is also a way to lose.

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• Curling — Slide eight stones down the ice. A light one curls; a hard one takes theirs out.
• Volleyball — Move, jump and keep it off your own floor. Hit it rising and it goes long.
• Stack Rush — One tap: drop the sliding block on the tower. Miss the edge and it gets sliced. How high can you go?
• Snake — The timeless classic. Eat, grow, speed up, and try not to become your own worst obstacle.

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