How to play Brick Breaker
Keep the ball in play with your paddle and break every brick on the screen to clear the level. At the start of each life the ball sits on the paddle, so line up your shot and launch when you are ready.
Where the ball lands on the paddle sets its angle. Near the center sends it almost straight up, near the edges sends it out wide. The ball gets a little faster every level. When the ball goes about 5 seconds without hitting a brick, the paddle nudges the next bounce toward one it can reach, so you never spend ages chasing the last few.
You start with 3 lives and can hold up to 6. Losing every ball on the screen costs one life. There are 8 handmade levels, and from level 9 on every level is generated with more tough bricks, steel and explosives, so the game keeps going until you run out of lives.
Brick types in Brick Breaker
Normal bricks break in one hit and their color changes by row. Silver bricks are tougher: they take 2 or 3 hits, the dots show how many are left, and they crack and darken each time you hit them.
Dark steel bricks never break, so you have to bounce the ball through the gaps. Red explosive bricks blow up the 8 bricks around them (steel survives) and set off any explosive brick next to them, so one hit can start a chain.
Brick Breaker power ups
Broken bricks sometimes drop a capsule. Catch it with the paddle to use it: Wide paddle (15 seconds), Tiny paddle (the bad one, 10 seconds), +2 balls, Slow ball (10 seconds), Laser (8 seconds, fire with Space, click or tap), Catch (12 seconds, the ball sticks to the paddle for up to 2.5 seconds so you can slide over and aim, then flies off by itself, or sooner with Space, a click or a tap) and Extra life.
The time left on each active power up shows at the bottom of the screen. Losing a life or clearing a level ends all of them.
Brick Breaker scoring and high score tips
A normal brick is worth 50 points, an explosive brick 80, a brick that takes 2 hits 100 and one that takes 3 hits 150. Each hit that does not break a tough brick gives 10, and catching a capsule gives 50.
Every brick the ball or a laser breaks before the ball comes back to the paddle builds a chain. Every extra brick in the chain adds 10 more points, up to 200 extra per brick. Bricks taken out by an explosion give their normal points but do not add to the chain. Clearing a level adds a bonus of 500 times the level number.
Chains are where the big points are. Open a gap and send the ball above the bricks: once it gets behind the wall it bounces along the top and breaks a long chain on its own. Hit explosive bricks early to clear big chunks, and dodge the red capsule with arrows pointing inward if you can.
Can you play Brick Breaker on your phone?
Yes. Drag anywhere on the game to move the paddle, tap to launch the ball and keep your finger down to keep the laser firing. Two thumbs work too: the first finger on the screen steers, and a tap with the other one launches or fires without moving the paddle.
Need a break? Tap the pause button in the top left corner. The game also pauses by itself when you switch tabs or tap somewhere else on the page, and it runs right in the browser with no download.