Eight-ball pool on a proper cloth table. You take solids or stripes by potting one, clear your set, and sink the black to win — and the same black loses it if you reach it early or foul on it. Play a friend on the same device, or a computer that plays the angles and thinks about where it is leaving itself.
The goal
Pot all seven of your group, then pot the black. That's the whole frame. The catch is at both ends of it: the table starts open, so neither player owns a group until somebody legally pots one, and the black at the end is the only ball that can lose you the game as easily as win it.
The break
The cue ball starts behind the head string — the line across the near quarter of the table — and you can put it anywhere behind it before you hit. A break has to send four balls to a cushion or pot something; a soft tap that does neither is a foul and hands the table over with ball in hand.
The black on the break decides nothing. It doesn't win the frame and it doesn't lose it — the rack is simply set again and the same player breaks. Nothing else that happened on that break carries over.
Taking solids or stripes
The table stays open after the break whatever went down. The first ball you legally pot after that takes you that group: pot the 3 and you're solids, pot the 11 and you're stripes, and your opponent gets the other set. Until then you can hit anything except the black first.
A ball that drops on a foul assigns nothing. The table stays open and nobody is handed a set by an accident — the foul still stands, so the incoming player gets ball in hand on an open table, which is a strong place to be.
Keeping the table
Pot one of your own legally and you shoot again. Miss legally and the table simply passes over — a miss is not a foul, and the incoming player has to play the cue ball where it lies. That distinction is worth internalising: leaving your opponent nothing is often better than a low-percentage pot that hands them the table and the cue ball.
The five fouls
Every one of them ends your turn and gives your opponent ball in hand — they can pick the cue ball up and place it anywhere legal on the table.
- Wrong ball first — the cue ball touches the other group, or the black, before one of yours.
- No contact — the cue ball hits nothing at all.
- No rail — you make contact but nothing is potted and no ball reaches a cushion afterwards. This is the one people forget; a gentle nudge into a ball that goes nowhere is a foul.
- Scratch — the cue ball goes down. It comes back up for the other player to place.
- A soft break — fewer than four balls to a cushion and nothing potted.
The black, both ways
Once your seven are gone you are on the black, and the frame ends on your next mistake or your next pot.
- Pot it last and clean — you win.
- Pot it with any of your group still up — you lose, immediately.
- Pot it on a foul — you lose, even though the black went down. Scratching in off the black is the classic version of this.
- Pot it while the table is still open — you lose.
There is a nasty double worth knowing: play your last colour, it drops, and the cue ball carries on and puts the black down on the same stroke. Both balls are down, but the black went with one still to go at the moment it dropped. That loses the frame.
Calling the black
Turn Call it on in the settings and the black has to be nominated. When you get to it, tap near the pocket you want and the game names it back to you; the shot rail stays locked until you have. In the called pocket wins; any other pocket loses, even though it went down. Pocket names are given from where you are looking, so "top left" means top left of your screen whichever way round the table is standing.
Aiming, and the guide line
Drag anywhere on the cloth to aim. The aim is relative: the cue turns by as much as your hand moved, from wherever it was already pointing. That is what lets you grab the butt of the cue — behind the ball, where a hand naturally goes on a phone — without the stick whipping round to point at your thumb. A small drag is a small adjustment from either side of the ball.
Two lines are drawn for you. The solid one runs from the cue ball to the ghost ball: where the cue ball's centre has to be at the moment of contact. The second shows where the object ball sets off once it's struck. Line the second one at a pocket and the pot is on — you're reading the angle rather than estimating it, which is the single biggest difference between this and squinting across a real table.
On a desktop the aim simply follows the mouse with no button held, the way every pool game on a computer has always worked.
Power
Press the Pull rail down the side of the table and drag down. The cue draws back as you go and the number tells you the percentage; let go and the shot is played. Slide back to the top before releasing to think again — nothing is committed until your finger comes up.
Power matters as much as aim and is the thing most people get wrong. Hard shots go in straighter but leave the cue ball wherever it ends up; soft shots hold position. A frame is usually lost by the shot after the one you were thinking about.
Controls
- Drag the clothAim. The line follows your hand and shows where contact happens.
- Drag the cue ballAfter a foul, place it. It slides to the nearest legal spot rather than refusing to move.
- Pull rail, drag downDraw the cue back. Let go to play the shot.
- Tap a pocketCalls it, when the black has to be called.
- ← →Turn the cue a step at a time.
- SpaceHold to power up, release to shoot.
- NRack a new frame.
- GearOpens the setup sheet — game, opponent, difficulty, who breaks, the cloth and the cue.
The two modes
Versus the computer
Pick a difficulty and who breaks — you, the computer, or Toss for a coin flip. It plays the shot out before choosing it rather than rolling a dice on whether to make one, so when it misses, it misses the way a person does.
Pass and play
Two people, one device. When the table changes hands a card comes up saying whose shot it is and why the last one ended, and the shot rail is dead until somebody taps it — so a stray thumb can't fire the incoming player's shot while the phone is still in the air. Pass and play keeps its own separate record from your games against the computer.
The three difficulty levels
What changes between them is how accurately the cue is delivered, how many candidate shots get played out in full before one is chosen, and whether the computer cares where the cue ball finishes. They were tuned against a measured pot rate on a real scattered table, not by feel.
Easy
Pots about one attempt in six. It isn't only shaky — it also picks the wrong shot fairly often, doesn't look past the pot it's attempting, and never plays a deliberate safety. It will leave you the table in a mess and hand it back.
Normal
About one in three. It plays ten candidate shots out in full before choosing, gives some weight to the table it leaves itself, and will play a safety when nothing is on. A real opponent for most people.
Hard
A little over half. Twelve shots played out, full weight on position, safeties, and it prefers shots that survive being struck slightly wrong rather than ones that only work if hit perfectly. It has real teeth — but it misses, so you get to the table, and a careful player using the guide line takes roughly half the frames off it.
Three other games on the same table
9-Ball
Nine balls in a diamond, the 1 on the apex and the 9 in the middle. You must strike the lowest ball on the table first every single shot — but anything that drops after that counts, so combinations and caroms are fully legal and are most of the game. Pot the 9 legally and you win, including straight off the break. Pot it on a foul and it goes back up on the table.
Bumper pool
A short table with pegs down the middle, one cup at each end, and five balls a side. You can play it on a rectangular bed or an octagonal one, where the four corners are cut at 45° and play as real cushions.
Each side has one marked ball and it has to go down your own cup first — until it does, nothing else you pot scores, and any ball you hole is put back on the table. Once the mark is down, the other four count. Put one of your balls down your opponent's cup and it scores for them. First to all five wins.
The frame opens with both players shooting at once, in turn: whoever's marked ball ends up nearest their opponent's cup goes first. Dead level is tossed for.
Practice
The full rack and no rules at all. Nothing is a foul, nothing wins, nothing ends. It's there for learning what the cue ball does after contact, which is the part of pool that actually takes practice.
How the table looks
Four cloths — emerald, navy, burgundy and olive — and four cues. The lighting has two settings: The hall, a lit table in a dark room, or Bright, which flattens the light so every ball reads at a glance. Both play exactly the same game; pick whichever you can see best on your screen.
On a phone the table stands up, head rail at the bottom under your thumb, because a pool table is twice as long as it is wide and a phone is the other way round. Turn the phone sideways, or open it on a laptop, and it lies down the normal way.
Tips
Think about the next shot, not this one
The best players here aren't potting harder balls, they're leaving themselves easier ones. Before you commit to power, look at where the guide line says the cue ball is going after contact and ask whether you'd want to shoot from there.
Pick your group by what's left, not what's nearest
The break decides very little; the first ball you pot decides a lot. Before you take a set, look at where all seven of each group are sitting. Taking stripes because one is hanging over a pocket, when the other six are locked up against a cushion, loses frames.
A miss is cheaper than a foul
If nothing is on, hit your own group and put the cue ball somewhere awkward. You give up the table, but not ball in hand — and ball in hand is worth more than most pots.
Don't clear your last colour until you can see the black
Potting your seventh ball puts you on the black immediately. If the black is snookered behind three of your opponent's, you have just made your own position much worse. Leave a colour on the table as a spare shot if it buys you the angle.
Slow down on the break
Maximum power scatters the balls but also scatters the cue ball, and a scratch on the break hands over the table with the rack already opened up for them. A firm break that keeps the cue ball near the middle is worth more than a spectacular one.
Good to know
- Your settings and your record are saved on your device. Two separate records are kept — one against the computer, one for pass and play — and a button in the setup sheet clears them.
- "Best run" is the most balls you've potted in one visit to the table, which is a better measure of a player than a single frame is.
- No account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data clears your record and your settings.
- The physics runs in real table units — a nine-foot bed measured in inches, with a 2.25-inch ball — so a hard break really is about nineteen miles an hour rather than a number that only means something at one screen size.