Volleyball — free 2D game against the computer

Two players, one net, one ball, seen from the side. The ball falls under gravity and bounces off whatever it touches, and the only thing that matters is that it does not land on your half of the floor. Move left and right, jump, and put your body in the way. There is no aiming button: where the ball goes depends entirely on where on you it hits and which way you are moving when it does.

First to five points takes the match, which keeps a match to about a minute — seven ran long. Your score is matches won in a row, and the computer gets faster and reads the ball further ahead with every match you take, which is the same difficulty curve Pong and Air Hockey use here.

How to play

• ◀ and ▶ move you. JUMP leaves the floor. On a keyboard it is the arrow keys and the space bar.
• The ball bounces off you: hitting it with the top of your head sends it up, and the side sends it sideways.
• Your own movement is added to the bounce, so running into the ball hits it harder than standing still.
• A point is scored when the ball lands on the floor. Whoever's half it landed on loses the point.
• The net is solid: the ball bounces off it, and neither player may cross it.
• Five points wins the match. Lose a match and your streak ends.

Why hitting it on the way up is the whole game

The bounce is a reflection off a circle, so the point of contact decides the angle: hit the ball with the very top of your head and it goes almost straight up, hit it with the side and it flies off at a shallow angle. That much is geometry. What makes it a game is that your own velocity is added to the ball's, which means the same contact point gives a different shot depending on what you were doing at the time.

So a ball struck while you are rising goes long and flat, and the same ball struck while you are falling drops short. That is the entire attacking vocabulary: jump early and drive it deep, or wait and let it fall so it flops just over the net. Against a computer that positions itself where the ball is going to land, the short one is much harder to answer, because it has to change direction rather than simply be in the right place.

Defending is the reverse. Stand a little further back than feels right — the ball comes off a rising opponent faster than you expect — and remember that you can hit it more than once, so a desperate touch that keeps it up is worth more than a clean one that goes out. If you like the shape of this, Pong is where the same ramping opponent came from and Air Hockey is the version where you strike the puck with a mallet rather than your head.

More games

More from 🕹️ Arcade & one-tap games:

• 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.
• Flappy Dot — One tap to flap, endless pipes to dodge. Gaps shrink as you score — medals at 10, 25, 50 and 100.
• Brick Breaker — Smash all 48 bricks with a bouncing ball — aim off the paddle's edge for sharp angles. Three lives, faster every level.
• Whack a Mole — Thirty seconds, nine holes, moles that get faster every second. Hit the gold one, never the bomb.

Or browse all games.