Bubble Shooter

About Bubble Shooter

Bubble Shooter looks like a colour-matching game and is actually a game about structure. Matching three bubbles pops three bubbles, which is fine. Cutting the single bubble that was holding a cluster to the ceiling drops the entire cluster, which is the whole game. The scoring says so out loud: popped bubbles are worth ten, dropped ones are worth twenty.

The wall bounce is what makes that possible. A bubble fired at an angle ricochets off the side and arrives underneath the stack, at the load-bearing bubble you could never hit directly. This version draws a dotted guide through the first bounce so you can plan the shot rather than guess it, shows the next bubble so you can set up two shots at a time, and lets you swap the two whenever the one in the chamber is wrong.

How to play

1. Move the mouse or your finger to aim. The dotted line shows the path, including the first wall bounce.
2. Click, tap or press Space to fire. The bubble sticks where it lands.
3. Three or more of the same colour touching each other pop.
4. Any bubbles left hanging with no path to the ceiling fall, and score double.
5. A new row pushes in every few shots. If the stack reaches the line above your shooter, the run is over.
6. From level 3 the launcher sometimes hands you a rainbow bubble, which takes the colour of whatever it lands against, or a bomb, which clears everything within about a bubble and a half of where it hits.
7. The furthest level you reach is remembered in your browser, so the next visit offers to start you there instead of back at level one.

Five tips that actually move your score

• Aim for the support, not the colour. The best shot is rarely the biggest match. Look for the bubble that a large group hangs from and cut that instead — the drop is worth twice as much and clears far more of the board.
• Bank off the walls constantly. A direct shot can only reach the underside of the stack in a straight line. The bounce is how you get behind an overhang, and it is the difference between an intermediate player and a good one.
• Clear the edges to buy time. Bubbles at the far left and right are the hardest to reach later and the first to force an awkward shot. Keeping the sides tidy keeps your angles open.
• Use the swap. If the bubble in the chamber has nowhere useful to go, swapping it for the next one costs nothing but the shot you were going to waste.
• Do not fire just because you can. Each shot brings the next row closer. A shot that neither pops nor sets up a pop is worse than thinking for another five seconds.
• Spend the bomb on the middle, not the top. A bomb fired into the ceiling wastes half its radius on empty space. Fired into the thickest part of the stack it takes out a dozen bubbles and usually cuts something loose as well.
• A rainbow is a colour you do not have. Save it for the moment the board is three colours deep and the launcher will not give you the one you need — it becomes whatever it touches, so it can finish a group nothing else could reach.

Frequently asked questions