How to play Brick Breaker

By Ari Hlynsson · 1 player · Updated 10 September 2026

Break every brick before you lose three balls. Bricks higher up the wall are worth more, and each level you clear returns faster than the last.

The rules, step by step

1. 1

   Move the paddle with the mouse, your finger, or the left and right arrow keys.

2. 2

   Tap the board or press space to serve. The ball leaves the paddle at a fixed angle, so the first shot is the same every time and the rest is yours.

3. 3

   The ball bounces off the walls and the ceiling without losing pace. Only the paddle changes its direction in a way you control.

4. 4

   Where the ball lands on the paddle sets the angle it leaves at: the middle sends it straight up, the edges send it away at up to sixty degrees.

5. 5

   Every brick you hit disappears and scores. The top row is worth 50 and the bottom row 10.

6. 6

   A ball that goes past the paddle costs a life. Three lost balls end the game.

7. 7

   Clear all fifty bricks and the next level starts with a full wall and a faster ball.

Tips that change how you play

• Aim with the edges of the paddle, not the middle. A centre hit returns the ball on the path it arrived by, which is the one path you already know has nothing left in it.
• Work a channel up one side. Two or three bricks removed from the same column lets the ball through the wall, where it bounces along the ceiling and clears the expensive top row without you touching it.
• Follow the ball with small movements. The paddle is wide enough that big corrections overshoot, and an overshoot on a fast level is the life you lose.
• Take the steep angles early. The ball is slowest on level one, so that is the cheapest time to practise the edge hits you will need on level four.

Why the channel is worth it

Say you have taken four bricks out of the second column from the left, all the way up to the top row. The next ball you send up that column does not come back — it passes the wall, hits the ceiling, and starts bouncing between the ceiling and the top of the remaining bricks. Each bounce takes another brick, and the top rows are the ones worth 40 and 50. You are not touching the paddle at all for several seconds. That is the whole strategy of this game in one paragraph, and it is why the four shots it takes to dig the channel are worth more than four bricks broken anywhere else.

Mistakes that cost beginners the game

Chasing the ball to the middle of the paddle every time.

It feels safest and it is why the ball keeps coming back down the same corridor. A centre hit reverses the vertical direction and leaves the horizontal one alone, so the ball retraces its own path into a gap it has already made. Use the edges deliberately to move the ball across the wall.

Breaking bricks wherever they happen to be.

Fifty bricks broken at random is fifty separate shots. Two or three broken in a line up one column is a channel, and a ball that gets through a channel does more damage on its own than you will do by aiming. Pick a column and stay with it.

Playing level four the way you played level one.

The ball is a third faster by then, which means your corrections have to start earlier rather than be bigger. Watch where the ball will be rather than where it is; the paddle only has to arrive at the same time it does.

Common questions about Brick Breaker