Block Pong
Neon polygons, each with a number on it, and one ball to wear them all down. Everything on screen is a rigid body in a real physics simulation, which is why the good shots feel earned.
- Players
- One
- Controls
- Drag to aim, release to launch
- The bar
- Three thousand points
- A run takes
- A few minutes, or a lot longer
- Runs on
- Any current browser — physics by matter.js
Drag to aim
Pull back, watch the line, let go. The ball leaves at the angle you set and then stops being your problem: from that moment it is the simulation's, bouncing off polygons, walls and whatever the last collision left lying at an angle.
Every polygon carries a number. Hit it and the number comes down. Take it to zero and the polygon leaves the field, usually while the ball is still moving, which changes every bounce that was going to happen afterwards.
Why the physics matters
Nothing here is on rails. The field is a rigid-body simulation, so a shot fired two degrees off does not do almost the same thing — it does something else entirely, four bounces later. That cuts both ways, and it is the reason the game is worth replaying: the shot you did not plan is often better than the one you did.
The shots worth learning are the ones that keep the ball inside the field. A ball that finds a channel between two clusters and rattles down it will take more numbers off in one launch than three careful direct hits.
Three thousand
The game's own description sets the bar: three thousand points is the number worth bragging about. Your best is kept on your device, so the target is you, last week.
A finished run can be handed to someone else. The game copies a URL to your clipboard, and whoever opens it watches the run play back rather than reading a number they have no reason to believe.
Three habits that help
- Aim at gaps, not at blocks. A ball threaded into a gap collects everything around it. A ball fired at a face bounces straight back out of the field.
- Clear the edges. Polygons near a wall create the corridors that long rallies need. Opening one up early pays for the rest of the run.
- Watch the whole bounce. The information you need for the next shot is in the ricochets of the last one, not in where the ball ended up.
An older game, still standing
Block Pong lives at bp.game5.app and predates this site. It has not been rebuilt to match the newer work and it does not need to be — it does the one thing it does. See Games for the rest of the catalogue.