Pool — a free browser pool game with real collision physics

A full rack of fifteen, six pockets, one white ball. Pull back from the cue ball to aim and set your power, let go, and the table does the rest: balls transfer momentum along the line of contact, rebound off the cushions and drop when they cross a pocket mouth. There is no opponent and no turn order — the only number that matters is how many shots it takes you to clear the table.

The table is set up by the book: a 2:1 playing surface, six pockets — four corners and two on the midpoints of the long rails — the apex ball on the foot spot with the black 8 directly behind it, one solid and one stripe on the two back corners, and the white starting behind the head string. Potting the white costs you: it returns to the head string and the shot still counts. Free, no download, and it plays with one thumb — the same pull-back-and-release gesture as Mini Golf.

How to play

• Drag from the white ball and release. Pulling further back hits harder; the aim line shows where it is going.
• Pot all fifteen — solids, stripes and the black — to clear the table.
• Potting the white costs a shot and it is replaced behind the head string.
• Your score is total shots, so a shot that pots two balls is worth as much as two shots that pot one each.
• On a keyboard: ← → to aim, ↑ ↓ to set power, Space to shoot.

The ghost ball — why aiming straight at the ball always misses

The single most common mistake in pool is aiming the cue ball at the ball you want to pot. It feels obviously right and it is reliably wrong, because what sends the object ball towards the pocket is not where the cue ball is heading — it is where the two balls touch. On contact, the object ball leaves along the line joining the two centres at that instant, and nothing else about your shot changes that direction.

So the correct method, which every coach teaches and which this game's physics obeys exactly, is the ghost ball. Picture a phantom cue ball touching the object ball on the far side, directly opposite the pocket — its centre sits one ball-width from the object ball's centre, along the line from the pocket through the ball. Aim the real cue ball at that phantom position. If you can hit the ghost, the object ball has no choice but to set off towards the pocket.

It is worth knowing that the rack you are breaking into is the real one. The governing rules say the fifteen balls are racked in a triangle "with the apex ball on the foot spot and the eight ball as the first ball that is directly below the apex ball", and that "one from each group of seven will be on the two lower corners of the triangle" — so the black sits in the middle, one back corner is a solid and the other a stripe, and everything else is shuffled, exactly as the rules allow. The foot spot and the head string each sit a quarter of the table's length from their own rail, which is where you will find them here.

Two consequences of the ghost ball follow immediately, and both are visible on this table. First, thin cuts are unforgiving: as the angle between your approach and the pocket line grows, the same small aiming error throws the object ball further off, which is why a near-straight pot is worth manoeuvring for even if it takes an extra shot to set up. Second, the cue ball keeps going — it deflects along the tangent, perpendicular to the direction it just sent the object ball. Good players spend as much attention on where the white finishes as on whether the ball drops, because a pot that leaves the white snookered behind the pack has cost you the next shot. Since your score here is total shots for the whole rack, thinking one ball ahead is worth more than hitting the current one hard.

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More things to aim: Mini Golf, Darts, or Brick Breaker. Or browse all games.