Brick Breaker

Brick Breaker is the paddle-and-ball game that has been on every machine since the seventies. Fifty bricks in five rows, one ball, three lives. Clear the wall and the next one arrives eight per cent faster, and it keeps doing that until you run out.

The rule that makes it a game rather than a screensaver is the paddle. It is not a mirror: where along it the ball lands sets the angle it leaves at, so hitting the ball with the edge sends it away steeply and hitting it dead centre sends it straight back up. Everything you can do about where the ball goes next, you do in the moment it arrives.

The top row is worth five times the bottom one, which is the game's own way of saying that the shot worth setting up is the one that gets the ball behind the wall. Your best score is kept on this device and nowhere else.