Rules and how to play
The bricks are lined up near the top of the board, and the paddle is at the bottom edge (in the “Angled” view, the top is the far side and the bottom is the near side). Move the paddle left and right to hit the ball back when it comes down. The ball bounces off the walls, the ceiling, and the bricks. A brick breaks when the ball hits it, and you clear the stage when every brick is broken. Hard bricks break after several hits.
If the ball goes past the bottom edge, you miss it and lose 1 life. You start with 3 lives, and the game is over when you have none left. When there are several balls, you lose a life only when all of them have gone past the bottom edge.
At the start of each stage and after a miss, the ball sits on the paddle and moves with it until you launch it. On desktop, click the board or press the Space key; on a phone, tap the board to launch the ball. If you do nothing, the ball launches automatically after 3 seconds. It always launches in the same direction: slightly to the right of straight up (about 19°).
Each time you hit the ball with the paddle, it gets 1.2% faster, and after 32 hits it reaches the limit (1.45 times its starting speed). The ball goes back to its starting speed when you miss it and when you move on to the next stage. You can choose the starting speed under “Ball speed” in the menu: “Slow”, “Normal”, or “Fast”. “Slow” is about 0.78 times and “Fast” is 1.25 times the speed of “Normal”.
If you check “Relaxed” in the menu, missing the ball does not cost a life and the game is never over. You can keep going until the last brick, however many times you miss. When you clear a stage in Relaxed mode, it is recorded as a cleared stage. However, the score is not recorded (your best score on this stage does not change).
Which way the ball bounces
The direction of the ball after a paddle hit depends only on where the ball hits the paddle. The angle it came in at and the direction the paddle was moving make no difference. A hit in the center sends the ball straight up, a hit right of center sends it to the right, and a hit left of center sends it to the left.
The farther from the center the ball hits, the flatter its path becomes. The ratio of its sideways speed to its upward speed is proportional to the distance from the center of the paddle. A hit on a corner of the paddle gives the flattest path, at about 22° from horizontal. The path never gets closer to horizontal than that, so the ball does not keep bouncing back and forth almost horizontally.
Off the walls, the ceiling, and any part of a brick other than its corners, the ball bounces away at the same angle it came in at. When the ball hits a corner of a brick, it bounces away at the same angle it came in at, measured from the line between the corner and the center of the ball. After bouncing off a corner, the ball never moves closer to horizontal than the flattest path the paddle gives (about 22° from horizontal). If the ball goes 12 seconds without hitting any brick, its sideways direction changes slightly so that it does not keep repeating the same path.
Types of bricks
There are 4 types of bricks.
- Normal brick: breaks after 1 hit. The color changes slightly from row to row.
- Hard brick: breaks after 2 hits. It is a darker color than the normal bricks in the same row and gets lighter after 1 hit.
- Very hard brick: breaks after 3 hits. It is gray, slightly taller than the other bricks, and gets darker with each hit.
- Exploding brick: explodes after 1 hit and breaks the bricks in the 8 squares around it at once, however hard they are. It is orange.
If the bricks caught in an explosion include another exploding brick, that brick explodes too and breaks the 8 squares around it (a chain reaction). When exploding bricks are lined up next to each other, the chain continues to the end of the line.
Broken bricks shatter into flying pieces, and the screen shakes a little when a brick explodes and when you miss the ball. The pieces and the shaking are only visual and do not affect the ball or the score. To stop the shaking, uncheck “Shake the screen on explosions” in the menu. If a setting to reduce motion is turned on on your device (such as “Reduce Motion” on iPhone), the screen does not shake and the pieces are not shown.
Power-ups
About 10% of the normal and hard bricks contain a power-up. A brick with a power-up has a white circle on its top face, and above it floats a small shape with the same color and form as the power-up that falls, so you can tell it apart from other bricks. When you break one of these bricks, a colored shape falls slowly, spinning as it goes. Catch it with the paddle to start its effect. A power-up that goes past the bottom edge without being caught is lost.
- More balls (yellow): each ball in play splits into 3. Up to 24 balls can be in play at once.
- Wider paddle (light blue): the paddle becomes about 1.5 times as wide for 15 seconds.
- Pierce (magenta): for 8 seconds, the balls go straight through bricks without bouncing and break every brick they touch in 1 hit, however hard it is.
- Slower ball (green): the balls move at 0.7 times their speed for 10 seconds.
- Floor (periwinkle): a glowing line appears along the bottom edge of the board and bounces a falling ball back once. Catching another one before it is used still gives only 1 bounce.
- Extra life (pink): you get 1 more life, up to a maximum of 9.
When you miss (when every ball has gone past the bottom edge), any power-ups still falling are lost, and the wider paddle, pierce, and slower ball effects end. If you catch the same power-up again while its effect is still active, the effect starts over from the beginning.
How scoring works
Breaking a brick scores 10 points for a normal brick, 25 points for a hard brick, 40 points for a very hard brick, and 15 points for an exploding brick. Hitting a hard brick scores nothing until it breaks. Bricks broken by an explosion score the same points.
The number of bricks you break between one paddle hit and the next is counted as your combo. Every brick after the first in a combo adds a bonus of (combo − 1) × 2 points, and from brick 21 of a combo on, the bonus stays at 40 points. For example, if you break 10 bricks in a row after a paddle hit, brick 10 adds 18 points. Once the combo reaches 5, it appears on the board, as in “5 combo”. When there are several balls, the combo goes back to 0 when any one of them is hit with the paddle.
When you clear a stage, you get 100 points for each life you have left. The result card shows your score, your best score on this stage, and your longest combo. When you play in Relaxed mode, your best score on this stage is not shown.
Controls on this page
In the menu to the right of the 3D view (or below it on a narrow screen), choose a stage and a “Ball speed”, then press the button with the stage name in it, such as “Start Stage 1 / 24”.
On desktop, move the mouse left and right over the board and the paddle follows the mouse. With the keyboard, move the paddle with the ← → keys or the A and D keys. Launch the ball by clicking the board or pressing the Space key.
On a phone, slide your finger left and right across the board, and the paddle moves by the same distance as your finger. You do not need to put your finger on the paddle, so your finger does not hide the ball. Tap the board (lift your finger without moving it) to launch the ball. Sliding across the board does not scroll the page.
Pause with the pause button at the top right of the board, or with the P or Esc key. Press “Resume”, or press the P key or the Space key, to continue. The game also pauses automatically when you switch to another tab or app, when you use another window, and when most of the board scrolls off the screen.
On this page, sound effects are on by default. Turn them on or off with the speaker button at the top right of the board. While you are playing, you can also use the M key. When you are not playing (in the menu, while paused, or on the result card), switch the view with “Angled” and “Top-down” at the top right of the board.
Choosing a stage and the daily stage
There are 24 stages in all, each with 30–82 bricks. Stages 1–12 were laid out by hand by the operator, and stages 13–24 were built by a program from a layout determined by the stage number. Every stage is symmetrical left to right. Among stages 13–24, higher-numbered stages tend to have more rows and more hard bricks (stage 13 has 7 rows and 4 hard bricks; stage 24 has 10 rows and 32). A given stage always has the same layout and the same bricks containing power-ups.
At first, you can choose only stage 1. When you clear a stage, you can also choose the next one. Clearing a stage in Relaxed mode also lets you choose the next one. In the menu, the buttons for cleared stages are colored, and stages you cannot choose yet are shown faded.
The daily stage is built by a program for each date in Japan time, and everyone who plays that day gets the same layout. So that everyone plays under the same conditions, the ball speed is fixed at “Normal” and Relaxed mode is not available. It is built the same way as stages 13–24, and its number of rows and of hard bricks are about the same as in stages 16–19. Your best score for the day on this device is shown in the menu.
When you finish a stage, the result card shows a URL with the stage number, your score, and the ball speed in it. If you send this URL to someone, the stage, the ball speed, and the score appear in their menu as a “Challenge received”, and they can play that stage even if they cannot choose it yet. When they play that stage, the ball speed is the same as yours, and Relaxed mode is not available. When they finish, the result shows whether they beat the score you sent. The URL is not shown for stages played in Relaxed mode or for the daily stage.
Strategy tips
- Where the ball hits the paddle decides which way it goes. To send it to the right, place the paddle slightly to the left of where the ball is coming down so that it hits the right side of the paddle. If you keep hitting it with the center, the ball goes straight up and keeps hitting the same column.
- Aim for exploding bricks first. They break the 8 squares around them however hard the bricks are, so when hard or very hard bricks are nearby, you do not need to hit them again and again.
- Open a vertical path through the bricks and get the ball into the space above them. The ball keeps bouncing between the ceiling and the bricks, so bricks keep breaking without paddle hits. Your combo grows as well, so you score more points.
- The ball always launches in the same direction (slightly to the right of straight up). Before launching, move the paddle to choose where the ball hits first.
- When there are several balls, follow the lowest one. Go after a power-up only when you can still get back in time to hit the ball.
The operator had a program play all 24 stages to compare hit positions on the paddle (ball speed “Normal”). The program always hits the ball back, with the paddle moving to the ball instantly. When the hit position was shifted left or right each time, the median time to clear a stage was 109 seconds (100 runs of each of the 24 stages). When the ball was always hit with the center, the median was 256 seconds, about 2.3 times as long.
In the same runs, the time from when 10% of the bricks remained until the stage was cleared was 22% of the time for the whole stage (median). On stage 8, a single chain explosion broke as many as 20 bricks at once.
Origin and history of Brick Breaker
Brick breaker games grew out of Breakout, a video game that Atari released for arcades on May 13, 1976. It turned the company’s 2-player game Pong (1972) into a single-player game and was conceived by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow. The prototype circuit was built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who later founded Apple. In Japan, it was released by Namco.[1][4]
A game in which a paddle hits a ball to erase dots on the screen had already appeared in 1974: Clean Sweep, released by Ramtek. The 1978 sequel Super Breakout added play with several balls moving at once.[4]
In Japan, this kind of game is called block kuzushi (“block breaking”), a name that English Wikipedia also gives as the Japanese name. In 1979, Nintendo released Block Kuzushi as one model in its Color TV-Game series of home consoles. It was based on Breakout and included 6 variations of the game.[4][2][5]
Arkanoid, released by Taito in July 1986, added power-ups, enemies, and bricks that take several hits to break, and it set off a second wave of popularity for brick breaker games.[6][4]
In May 2013, on the anniversary of Breakout’s release, Google added a hidden game to Google Images: searching for “Atari Breakout” turned the image results into bricks that you could play with.[3][4]
Sources
- Atari, “Atari - 1972 - 1984” (history page on the official Atari website; Internet Archive copy from 2016) (opens in a new tab)
- Erik Voskuil, “Nintendo Color TV Game Block Kuzushi (任天堂 カラー テレビゲーム ブロック崩し, 1979)” (Before Mario, 2011) (opens in a new tab)
- Chenda Ngak, “Play Atari ‘Breakout’ in Google image search” (CBS News, 2013) (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia (English), “Breakout (video game)” (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia (Japanese), “カラーテレビゲーム” [Color TV-Game] (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia (Japanese), “アルカノイド” [Arkanoid] (opens in a new tab)
Frequently asked questions
Is Brick Breaker free to play?
Yes, it’s free. You don’t need to sign up or install an app. Open this page to play all 24 stages and the daily stage in 3D in your browser.
Can I play it on my phone?
Yes. Open this page in your phone’s browser and play without downloading an app. Slide your finger left and right across the board to move the paddle, and tap the board to launch the ball. The game pauses automatically when most of the board is off the screen, so play with the whole board on the screen.
How do I get more balls?
Catch the yellow power-up with your paddle, and each ball in play splits into 3. Power-ups are in about 10% of the normal and hard bricks and fall when those bricks break. Up to 24 balls can be in play at once. However many balls you have, you don’t lose a life until all of them are gone.
How is the direction of the ball’s bounce decided?
After a paddle hit, the direction depends on where the ball hits the paddle: straight up from the center, 45° from about halfway between the center and the end, and about 22° from horizontal from a corner. Hits on the right side go right, and hits on the left side go left. Off the walls, the ceiling, and any part of a brick other than its corners, the ball bounces at the same angle it came in at. When it hits a corner of a brick, it bounces at the same angle it came in at, measured from the line between the corner and the center of the ball. Even then, its path is never closer to horizontal than about 22°.
How do I turn off the sound?
Press the speaker button at the top right of the board to turn sound effects off. While you’re playing, you can also use the M key. Sound effects are on by default on this page, and the setting you choose is saved on this device and used in this site’s other games too. On iPhone, sound effects may not play while the phone is in silent mode.
What else are brick breaker games called?
In English, they are also called Breakout clones, after the game they came from. English Wikipedia notes that in Japan they are called block kuzushi. The original game was Breakout, which Atari released in 1976.
Where are my records saved?
Your records (best score on each stage, cleared stages, and your best score of the day on the daily stage) and your settings are saved only in the browser on this device. Game statistics, such as the fact that you started playing, whether you cleared the stage, a range for how long you played, and your ball speed and Relaxed settings, are sent to this site’s server. Your score, the brick layout, and how you moved the paddle are not sent. If you turn off “Send game statistics” at the bottom of the page, the statistics are not sent either (see the privacy policy for details).
Sending game statistics
Information such as the start and end of each game, whether connections in games with a friend succeeded, and 3D display failures is sent to this site’s servers. It is used to find out which games are played to the end and on which devices display or connection fails, so that bugs can be fixed and the games improved. To stop sending it, turn off the switch below.
What is sent
Game type, mode (vs computer, pass and play on one device, solo, or with a friend), computer level, game settings (the rules for Gomoku and Checkers, the number of players for Ludo, Chinese Checkers, Daifugo, Sevens, Concentration, Old Maid, Bozu Mekuri and Hyakunin Isshu Karuta, the number of rounds for Daifugo, Sevens and Old Maid, the tokens per player and shorter game rules for Ludo, the draw count and the way the deal is chosen for Klondike Solitaire, the way the deal is chosen for FreeCell, the number of suits and the way the deal is chosen for Spider Solitaire, the board size and the way the game is chosen for 2048, the number of months, the Flower Viewing and Moon Viewing setting, and doubling at 7 points for Hanafuda (Koi-Koi), and the ball speed, whether Relaxed is on, and whether a numbered stage or the daily stage was played for Brick Breaker, and the face, blindfold level, number of players, and whether the game was opened from a shared URL for Fukuwarai), result, number of moves, game length range, the screen where a room for a game with a friend was created (the menu, the game result, or “Invite again with a new link”), whether connecting, watching, and taking a seat in games with a friend succeeded and the number of reconnections, 3D display failures and rendering speed range, the time range from opening the page until the 3D display starts (if you leave the page or switch to another tab or app before it starts, that fact and the time range until then), the connection speed range at that time (as estimated by the browser), how much of the page’s program files was loaded from the browser’s cache saved on an earlier visit (all, some, or none), the types of loading failures, device type (whether it is a phone, and memory and CPU core ranges), browser and OS type, and an identifier that is created anew each time you open a page (it is not stored).
What is never sent
Room IDs, seat tokens, moves and board positions (when you clear the daily challenge in Klondike Solitaire, FreeCell, or Spider Solitaire, or finish the daily challenge in 2048, the moves and time are sent to check the result, but they are not recorded after the check), Hit and Blow numbers, GPU model names, and page URLs. IP addresses are only used in memory to limit the number of transmissions, and are not recorded. Data is sent only to this site’s servers and is not given to outside companies. Records are deleted after 30 days (the counts for the daily challenge in Klondike Solitaire, FreeCell, and Spider Solitaire and for the daily challenge in 2048 after 60 days).
How the records are handled, and what ads and analytics send to outside companies, is described in the privacy policy.