Ricochet — a free bouncing ball brick game in your browser

Ricochet gives you one decision a round and makes it count. A row of numbered bricks drops in at the top, everything already on the board shifts down towards you, and then you pick a single angle. Every ball you own fires along that line, one after another, and from that moment you are a spectator: they bounce off the walls, the ceiling and the bricks, knocking a point off everything they touch, until the last one drops back to the floor. Then the wall comes down another row.

The trick is that a good angle does not hit the most bricks — it finds the pocket where a ball gets stuck rattling. A ball wedged between a brick and the ceiling can take twenty points off a row before it works its way free, and finding that pocket is worth more than any amount of careful spreading. Meanwhile the numbers on the bricks climb with every round while your ball count only climbs when you catch a pickup, so the arithmetic is always tightening. It is free, needs no download, and works with one thumb on a phone or the arrow keys on a desktop.

How to play

• Drag anywhere to aim — pull back and a dotted line shows where the first ball goes and where it bounces first.
• Let go to fire. Every ball you own follows that same line, one after another.
• Each ball knocks one point off every brick it touches. A brick at zero pops.
• Catch the ⬤ pickups to add a ball to your volley. They are the only way your firepower grows.
• Where the first ball lands is where the next round fires from, so the last bounce matters as much as the first.
• Tap once during the volley to fast-forward it. Nothing is lost — the balls fly the same path, faster.
• If a brick reaches the red line at the bottom, the run is over. Your score is the number of rounds you survived.

Why the best shot is nearly always the flattest one you can get away with

A ball fired steeply up the board hits the ceiling, comes almost straight back down, and lands. Two or three bricks, maybe. A ball fired at a shallow angle into the gap under an overhanging brick does something entirely different: it wedges into a corner where every bounce sends it back into another face, and it stays there taking a point off each brick per bounce until the geometry finally spits it out. The first shot is tidy. The second is worth ten of it.

This is why the game will not let you fire flatter than about ten degrees above horizontal. Without that limit the strongest move is a nearly level shot along the floor, which skips the length of the board off the side walls and never runs out of bricks to clip — it trivialises every row and turns a puzzle into a single memorised angle. Ten degrees is enough to keep the sideways rattle available as a skill, and steep enough that the ball must eventually climb into the wall and deal with what is actually there.

The second thing worth knowing is that where your balls finish is a move in itself. Next round fires from wherever the first ball came to rest, so a shot that clears bricks but leaves you pinned in a corner has spent your position to buy damage. Good players routinely take a slightly worse angle this round to land somewhere the following round can use — which is the same trade every turn-based game is really made of, dressed up as a physics toy.

More games

Try Brick Breaker or Bubble Shooter, or browse all games.