How to play
A wall of bricks sits across the top of the board, your paddle sits at the bottom, and one ball bounces between them. Nothing moves until you launch, so take a second to place the paddle where you want it first. Every brick the ball touches disappears and adds to your score, and the higher rows are worth more than the lower ones, which is why the run only really pays once you have opened a way into the back of the wall.
You have three balls. Letting one fall past the paddle costs a life but nothing else: the score stays, the level stays, and the bricks you already cleared stay gone. Clear the whole wall and the next level builds the same layout again with the ball moving a small amount faster, and this repeats for as long as you keep a ball alive. When the third ball drops, the run is over and the score is compared against the best score stored in this browser.
The bounce is not fixed. The paddle behaves like a curved surface: catch the ball in the centre and it goes back nearly vertical, catch it toward either end and it leaves at a much flatter angle, in the direction of the end you used. That single rule is the whole game, because it turns a reflex exercise into an aiming problem. Walls and bricks reflect normally, so once the ball is behind the wall it can rattle around and clear five or six bricks before it comes back down to you.
Controls
- Keyboard: ← and → slide the paddle, Space launches the ball and, once it is in play, pauses and resumes. After a game over, space starts a fresh run.
- Mouse: move the pointer across the board and the paddle follows it, which is the most precise option. Clicking the board launches the ball and later toggles pause.
- Touch: drag your finger across the board to move the paddle, tap to launch. The paddle centres on your finger, so aim slightly ahead of where the ball will arrive.
- Pause: the button above the board works too, and the game pauses itself if you switch to another tab, so nothing happens while you are not watching.
Strategy that raises your score
Aim with the edge of the paddle, not with the middle. A centre hit is the safe return and it will keep the ball alive, but it sends the ball back up on almost the same path it came down, which means you keep chipping at the same part of the wall. If you catch the ball on the outer third of the paddle you get a flat, fast angle that travels a long way sideways before it reaches the bricks, and flat angles are what let you reach the rows near the ceiling. The trade-off is real: a flat return also comes back to you further away, so only take the shot when you have time to get across.
The single most valuable habit is digging a channel. Pick one side, usually the side the ball already favours, and keep hitting the same column of bricks until you have cut a vertical gap from the bottom row all the way through the top. Then send the ball up that gap. Behind the wall the ball is trapped between the ceiling and the bricks, and it eats through the high-value rows on its own while you simply wait. One well-placed channel routinely clears more bricks than a minute of careful centre returns, and it is how good players finish a level with two lives still in hand.
Track the ball's vertical position rather than its horizontal position. Beginners follow the ball left and right, which means the paddle is always where the ball just was. Instead, watch how far down the screen the ball is and use that as a clock: while it is still in the top half you have plenty of time, so move deliberately to the spot you want and stop there. Pick your interception point early, settle the paddle, and let the ball come to you. Chasing produces exactly the panicked edge hits you did not intend, and those are the ones that fly off at an angle you cannot recover.
Two smaller points. When the wall is nearly clear, the ball spends long stretches crossing empty space, and it is easy to lose concentration and then misjudge a simple return, so treat the last few bricks as the most dangerous part of the level. And after each level the ball is faster, which means your old timing is slightly wrong: spend the first launch of a new level playing safe centre returns until you have recalibrated, then go back to hunting a channel.
Figures from our own play testing, offered as estimates and not records or verified statistics: a first attempt usually ends on level one or two, a player who has learned the channel trick tends to reach level three or four on three lives, and a full run lasts somewhere around three to six minutes.
Where the game came from
Breakout was an Atari arcade cabinet from the middle of the 1970s, and it grew directly out of Pong: take the two-player bat-and-ball game, remove the opponent, turn the far wall into something you can destroy, and you have a new genre. It was enormously influential. Block-breaking clones and successors appeared on nearly every home computer and console that followed, some adding power-ups, moving enemies or curved walls, and the format is still being remade today.
We have kept the description deliberately short because we would rather say less than repeat dates and names we cannot verify. What we can state plainly is that this implementation and every word on this page were written from scratch for Boss Games. It is plain JavaScript on a canvas, with no libraries and no external requests, the launch angle comes from your browser's cryptographic random source, the best score lives only in your own browser storage, and the colours are read from the site theme so the board matches light or dark mode.
Questions players ask
Why does the ball sometimes fly off almost sideways?
Because the paddle steers. The angle of the bounce depends on where the ball lands along the paddle: the middle sends it nearly straight up, and the further out you catch it the flatter the return. A very flat bounce usually means you caught the ball on the last few pixels of the edge, which is a useful shot on purpose and a dangerous one by accident.
Do I lose my score when I lose a life?
No. Score and level carry across all three lives, and the bricks you already cleared stay cleared. Losing a life only resets the ball onto the paddle, so you relaunch and continue the same wall. The run ends when the third ball is gone, and only then does the score go to the best-score box.
Does the game get faster on every level?
Yes, by a small factor each time you clear the wall. Level two is barely quicker than level one, but the increases compound, so by level five the ball crosses the screen noticeably faster and there is much less time to read a bounce. The paddle and the brick layout stay the same, so the only thing changing is how early you have to commit.