How to play
A wall of coloured glass bricks fills the top of a brass frame; your paddle slides along the bottom. Launch the ball, bounce it off the paddle and smash every glass brick in the window to move on to the next one. There are twelve windows. Let the ball fall past the paddle and you lose a life; you start with three.
- Mouse: move left and right to steer the paddle; click to launch.
- Keyboard: ← and → (or A and D) to steer, Space to launch, P to pause.
- Touch: drag anywhere on the window to steer; tap to launch.
- The ball sits on the paddle until you launch it, and it launches slightly away from the centre of the window.
Bricks
- Glass bricks (coloured by row) break with one hit and score 10.
- Thick glass has a dark inner border. The first hit cracks it, the second breaks it, for 20.
- Steel plates (grey with rivets) never break and score nothing; the ball simply bounces off.
- A brick with a white dot drops a power-up capsule when it breaks.
Breaking several bricks in a row without touching the paddle builds a combo: the second brick scores double, the third triple, up to five times. Any bounce off the paddle resets it. Clearing a window pays a bonus of 100 times the level number plus 50 per remaining life.
Power-ups
Catch a falling capsule with the paddle (50 points) to get:
- W, wide paddle: the paddle grows half again for about twelve seconds.
- ×3, triple ball: two extra balls split off the one in play, up to three at once. You only lose a life when the last ball drops.
- S, slow ball: the ball slows for about nine seconds.
- ♥, extra life: rare, up to five lives.
Angles and speed
Where the ball meets the paddle decides where it goes: the middle sends it almost straight up, the edges send it out at a steep angle. A perfectly straight shot is never possible, so a ball cannot bounce up and down in an empty column forever. If a ball somehow bounces for a long time without hitting anything, the next paddle hit nudges its angle a little.
The ball gets faster with each window and a little faster for every dozen bricks you hit within one. On the faster windows the game checks the ball’s path twice per step, so it never slips through a brick.
Strategy
- Keep the paddle under the ball first, then think about angles. Most lost lives come from chasing a capsule.
- Use the edges on purpose. A ball hit near the paddle’s end flies out at 60 degrees and runs along the top of the wall, clearing a whole row.
- Open a gap to the top. Once the ball is above the wall it bounces between the ceiling and the bricks and racks up combos without your help.
- Take slow ball on the late windows, and treat triple ball as a way to clear stubborn corners, not as safety.
- Steel plates on the later windows make angles unpredictable. Hit the glass around them from below rather than bouncing off the plates.
If you enjoy Brick Bounce, try Cart Rush or Curling Duel next.
