How to play Mini Golf

Eighteen holes, seen from directly above. Press anywhere on the course, drag away from where you want the ball to go, and let go — the ball fires the opposite way to your pull, as hard as the pull was long. Then it is out of your hands: it rolls, it slows, it bounces off the rails, and it either drops or it does not.

The shot

The drag starts anywhere. You do not have to press on the ball, and you should not try to — on a phone the ball is about the width of a fingertip and your finger would be sitting on the one thing you are trying to look at. Press anywhere on the felt and pull; the game measures the pull from wherever you started it.

Three things appear while you are pulling, and they are all the same shot said three ways: a dotted line from the ball showing where it is going and what it hits first, plus a fainter continuation showing where it goes after that bounce; a band drawn back out of the ball, whose length is the power and which turns from gold to hot orange when you are near full; and a ring round the ball that fills as the power does. Let go to hit. Pull back to almost nothing and let go and the shot is cancelled.

The preview stops after one bounce, deliberately. Two would be a solver, and reading the second bank yourself is most of what this game is.

Controls

• Drag and releaseAnywhere on the course. Pull away from the target; the further you pull, the harder the putt.
• Arrow keys←→ turn the aim, ↑↓ set the power. Hold Shift with the left and right keys for a fine aim.
• SpacePutts. Press it once to bring the aim line up at half power, adjust, then press again to hit.
• Tap the courseOnce a hole is finished, a tap anywhere moves on. So does Enter, and so does the button in the status row.
• COpens the scorecard. N starts a fresh round.
• GearOpens the settings sheet — one player or two, and who tees off first.

What is on a hole

Every hole is built out of the same five things, so once you have read one you can read all eighteen.

• Rails — the wooden edge. A ball comes off one at the angle it went in and a good deal slower, and using that on purpose is the difference between a three and a two on half the course.
• Blocks — the same wood, standing in the middle of the felt. They are walls that happen not to touch the edge, and they bounce exactly the same way.
• Sand — the pale raked patches. No penalty and no stroke; the ball simply stops almost at once. Getting into one costs you the rest of the shot.
• Water — the dark pools. One stroke, and the ball goes back to exactly where you played the shot from. Not to the edge of the pond: back to where you were, so the hole is a lesson rather than a fight.
• Slopes — the bands with chevrons on them. The chevrons point the way the ball is being pushed, and it is pushed the whole time it is on the band. The line you aim is not the line you get.

The front nine

Par 56 for the round, 27 out and 29 back. Each nine is in its order on purpose: something to learn the pull on, then one new idea at a time, then a finish that wants all of them.

• 1 · The Opener — par 2. A straight corridor with nothing on it. The only job here is to find out how hard your pull is.
• 2 · The Dogleg — par 3. An L. The cup is not in view of the tee from anywhere, so this is where the far rail stops being scenery.
• 3 · The Blocker — par 3. One slab across the straight line. Left and right are the same length, which is the point: you pick, not the hole.
• 4 · The Narrows — par 3. A gate four and a half ball-widths wide, with sand on both shoulders past it. Getting through is not enough; getting through straight is.
• 5 · The Carry — par 3. Water across two thirds of the hole and a land bridge on the right. A putt cannot fly, so the name is the hole having a joke at your expense — the only way over is around.
• 6 · The Fall — par 3. A band across the middle pushing right the whole way across. Aim at the cup and you finish right of it.
• 7 · The Horseshoe — par 4. A slab hanging off the top wall nearly to the floor, and the cup a full lap away in the far corner. The sand is in the obvious lazy route.
• 8 · The Pin — par 2. Short, open, one pillar. There is no route to solve here, only exactly how hard — which is why rounds are won and lost on it.
• 9 · The Long Way Home — par 4. A Z: along the bottom, up the right-hand channel, back along the top. The slope carries you toward the channel, which is helpful right up until you cannot stop.

The back nine

Par 29, and the same nine ideas with the safety off — plus three the front does not have at all: a wall that is not square to the frame, a cup with water the whole way round it, and a slope that runs up the hole instead of across it. Each of the three gets its own hole to itself before it is ever used with anything else, and by the eighteenth all three are on the same one.

• 10 · The Ricochet — par 3. The first wall on the course that is not square to the frame. It can be gone round at either end; the shot that gets down in two goes off it, because the face is pointed at the corner and the cup is straight up.
• 11 · The Island — par 3. Water all the way round the cup bar one mouth, and the mouth is off to the side of the tee. Hole 5 asked you to go round a pond. This one asks you to stop inside one.
• 12 · The Chicane — par 4. Three walls off alternating rails, each with a mouth wide enough to be no trouble on its own. Playing each gate as it comes is a four; the two is played at the first wall’s face rather than through its gap.
• 13 · The Climb — par 3. A slope that runs up the hole, pushing the ball back toward you the whole time it is on it. The one hole here where the answer is simply more — and the pockets either side of the cup are where too much ends up.
• 14 · The Fork — par 3. A pillar down the middle and two honest ways past it: left is short and straight and has sand in it, right is clean and half again as long. A full putt does carry the sand, so both are real routes.
• 15 · The Keyhole — par 2. The back nine’s hole 8. The cup sits in a pocket with the top rail right behind it, so the putt that is hard enough to be sure of reaching is hard enough to come straight back out of the gate it went in.
• 16 · The Crossfire — par 3. Two bands, equal and opposite. A ball crossing both at speed comes out near where it was aimed; a ball only just getting there spends far longer on the second than the first. The drift is set by the power, not the line.
• 17 · The Coil — par 4. One corridor that wraps three times and finishes in the middle. Nothing is in the way and nothing is a hazard: the cup is simply further away than a full putt can carry, twice over. It is the hole that is about the shot before the one that goes in.
• 18 · The Reckoning — par 4. The angled wall from 10, the slope from 6, the sand from 4 and the pond from 5, in the order you met them. The slope feeds you the way you have to go, and the water is only ever reached by deciding to hit it harder.

The two modes

Solo

Eighteen holes against the card. The top of the screen keeps the hole you are on, the strokes on it, and your running total against par — and that total counts par for the holes you have actually played, so a bad start reads as a bad start rather than as a catastrophe.

Finish the round and the best total is kept on your device. Only a better round replaces it.

Pass & play

Two people, one device, and both of you play every hole. One plays it out, the phone changes hands, the other plays the same hole, and then you both move on. Thirty-six legs, and the lower total after eighteen wins.

Who plays a hole first alternates hole by hole, and that is not a detail. Going second on a hole nobody has seen is a real advantage — you get to watch a line before you play it — so handing it to the same player eighteen times running would be a thumb on the scale for the whole round.

A sheet comes up between legs saying whose turn it is and how the last one went, so nobody arrives mid-animation on somebody else’s ball.

The card

The scorecard is on the button in the top bar at any point in a round, and it comes up by itself when the eighteenth hole is done. It is laid out the way a real card is: a nine at a time, out then in, each with its own subtotal, and the round’s total on the line underneath. Nine holes across, par along the top and your strokes below it — a hole under par is bright gold and carries a rule under the number, a hole over par is coral, so a round reads at a glance instead of needing adding up.

A hole nobody can finish is picked up at eight. It is high enough that you will not reach it by accident on a par 2, and it exists so that a ball wedged in a corner cannot hold up the game — which in two players is somebody else’s evening as well as your own.

Tips

Leave it short rather than long

The cup only takes a ball that arrives slowly enough to drop; hit it hard through the middle and it rides the far lip and rolls on. A putt that stops two feet short is one tap from being down. A putt that runs eight feet past is a whole shot back the other way, and it is often in the sand.

Aim at the rail, not at the cup

On the doglegs the cup is behind a wall and there is nothing to be gained by pointing at it. Pick the point on the rail that sends the ball where you want and aim at that. The dotted line already shows you where the bounce goes — move the aim until the faint second segment is pointing somewhere useful.

Play the fall before it happens

A slope is pushing the ball the entire time it is on the band, so the correction is not a small one. Aim well off the cup, on the side the chevrons are pushing away from, and let the hole bring it back. Crossing the band faster means less time on it and less push — which is sometimes the answer and sometimes exactly how you end up in the pond behind it.

The water is worth one stroke, not two

Because a splash puts you back where you played from, the real cost of going in is the stroke plus the shot you wasted — and no more than that. So on hole 5 the greedy line past the pond, and on hole 11 the firm one into the ring, are not madness; they are coin flips you are allowed to price. What it is never worth is taking the greedy line when the safe one was also going to get you there.

In two players, the short holes are the ones that decide it

Nobody loses four shots on hole 8 or hole 15. But everybody drops one on them sooner or later, and one stroke over eighteen holes is usually the whole margin. The long holes feel like where the game is; the short ones are where it is.

Good to know

• Every mark on the course — the felt, the rails, the sand, the water, the cup, the flag and the ball — is drawn by the page itself. There is no artwork to load, so it starts instantly and stays sharp at any size, and nothing on it came from anybody else.
• All eighteen holes are laid out in the same frame, so the ball is the same size on every one of them and the feel you build for a pull on hole 1 is still true on hole 18.
• Your best round and the pass-and-play tally are saved on your device. The settings sheet clears whichever of the two the current mode uses.
• No account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Clearing your browser data clears your best round and your settings.
• The course is fitted to whatever space the screen has, in portrait or landscape, and nothing on the page ever scrolls.