Breakout Strategy

Eight stages and three lives

A run has eight stages and starts with three lives. Missing every ball costs a life and restarts that stage from the beginning, and running out of lives ends the day's run.

Lives reset to three every time you clear a stage. So spending a life or two on an earlier stage costs you nothing once you clear it, and the real danger sits later, where the bricks pack in tighter.

Stages get denser and tougher as you climb

The brick grid is eight wide and six tall, forty-eight spaces total. The first stage fills a little over half of that, and each stage adds a bit more until stage eight is packed nine spaces in ten.

Starting from stage four, tough bricks that take two hits mix in, and their share climbs the further you go. That means more work in the same amount of time, and a single ball clearly falls behind in the later stages.

Six relics

Every time you clear a stage you're offered three relics and pick just one. Which three show up is decided by the date, so everyone sees the same three today.

Wide paddle widens your paddle, twin ball adds another ball, and slow motion slows the ball down to make it easier to handle. Hardened ball breaks a tough brick in one hit, extra life raises your life cap by one, and golden bricks doubles the score you get for clearing a stage.

Given how fast bricks pile up, it's safer to grab breaking power first. Twin ball clears bricks much faster, and hardened ball's value spikes once tough bricks show up at stage four.

Angle the ball off your paddle

Where the ball hits your paddle decides which way it bounces. Catch it dead center and it goes almost straight up, catch it near an edge and it flies off at a steep angle. Line the paddle up off to one side to angle a shot at a brick stuck in a corner.

The paddle doesn't teleport, it follows your finger at a fixed speed. So a ball suddenly sent to the far side can be missed, and it pays to position yourself ahead of time.

Scoring and today's run

Score comes in when you clear a stage, and later stages pay out more. Picking golden bricks doubles everything you earn afterward, so it's worth the most when you're confident you can clear all eight stages.

The brick layout and the ball's starting direction are both set by the date. Everyone gets the same board on the same day, and only the outcome differs person to person. When a run ends, how far you got shows up as an eight-space grid you can copy and share.

Progress between stages is saved, so closing the tab mid-run picks back up from the start of that stage. A new run opens once the date changes, though, and yesterday's does not carry over.