Mini Golf — free browser putting course, nine holes, no download

A whole round of crazy golf on one screen. You look down on the hole from above, drag back from the ball like a catapult and let go — the further you pull, the harder it goes. The ball rolls, slows, bounces off the timber walls and eventually stops, and wherever it stops is where you play your next shot from. Nine holes, one after the other, and your score is simply the number of strokes the round took you. Lower is better, which makes this one of the few games here where a big number is bad news.

The course gets meaner as you go. Hole 1 is a straight putt you can hole out in one. By the back nine there are blocks to bank around, sand that kills a rolling ball dead and water that costs you a stroke and sends you back to where you played from. It runs in any browser, on a phone with one thumb or on a desktop with the arrow keys, with nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.

How to play

• Press near the ball and drag away from it, then release. The ball fires in the opposite direction to your pull — pull back to go forward, exactly like a catapult.
• Pull distance is power. The aim line and the power bar show what you are about to hit; the bar caps out, so past a point pulling further adds nothing.
• On a keyboard: ← → to turn the aim, Space to start the swinging power meter, Space again to hit at whatever power the meter is showing.
• Sand drags the ball to a stop in a fraction of the distance. Water costs you one penalty stroke and replays the shot from where you hit it.
• The cup only takes a slow ball. Arrive too fast and you rattle over the lip and carry on.
• Eight strokes is the maximum on any hole. Hit the cap and the ball is picked up, the hole is scored 8 and you move on — a disaster hole costs you eight and no more.

Aim at the bounce, not at the cup

The instinct every new player brings is to point the aim line straight at the hole and pull hard. On hole 1 that works. From hole 2 on there is a block sitting on that line, and the useful realisation is that the wall is not an obstacle, it is a second aiming point. The ball reflects off a wall the way light reflects off a mirror — the angle it leaves at mirrors the angle it arrived at — so if you can picture the spot on the wall where those two angles are equal, you can putt at that spot and let the geometry deliver the ball round the corner. On a dogleg, that bank shot is frequently shorter than the two-shot route round the outside, and two shots saved over nine holes is a very good round.

The catch is that a bank is not free. Each bounce takes a bite out of the pace, so a shot planned round a corner needs noticeably more power than the same distance in a straight line — and power is the harder half of the game. The cup will only accept a ball that is already nearly done rolling. Arrive quickly and the ball skims the lip and keeps going, usually leaving you further away than the putt you started with, which means a well-aimed hard shot is often worse than a slightly wayward soft one. This is why the professionals' cliché about never leaving a putt short does not apply here at all: a putt that dies a body-length short of the cup leaves a tap-in you cannot miss, while the identical line hit 20% harder leaves you a longer putt back and costs you the stroke you just spent.

So play for the resting place, not the hole. Pick the power that would stop the ball a little past the cup if the cup were not there, and aim through the bank rather than at it. Sand deserves the same thinking in reverse — it eats speed so fast that the way past a bunker is around the edge of it, and a ball that does end up in sand needs close to full power just to escape. Water is the only truly expensive mistake on the course, because it is the one place where a stroke buys you no progress at all.

More games

More things to aim carefully at: Darts, Pool and Brick Breaker. Or browse all games.