Arcade air hockey against a computer opponent. Move your paddle around your half of the table, drive the puck into the AI's goal, and defend your own. First to seven goals takes the match. Each goal briefly flashes the screen and resets the puck to the centre for a fresh serve, so the pace never lingers on a dead moment for long.
Drag your paddle with a finger or the mouse — it follows wherever you move, clamped to your own half so you can't camp in front of the AI's goal mouth. On desktop you can also steer with the arrow keys or WASD, which move the paddle at a fixed speed rather than jumping to the cursor. P or Escape pauses the match, and M or the speaker icon mutes the sound effects that mark wall bounces, paddle hits and goals.
Every goal restarts play with a short "get ready" serve delay and sends the puck toward the player who just conceded, so a big goal doesn't hand the scorer an unfair immediate follow-up shot. The match ends the instant either side reaches seven — there's no overtime or golden goal, just a straight race to seven.
This is the difference between a real air hockey game and a bouncing-ball demo. The paddle's own velocity is tracked frame to frame — including when you're steering with the keyboard, not just when dragging — and fed into the puck on contact, so a fast swing genuinely drives the puck and a slow, deliberate touch cushions and controls it. If paddles were treated as stationary obstacles you could only ever deflect the puck, never actually strike it, and there would be no skill in the game at all beyond simple positioning.
The puck is also swept against the paddles in substeps rather than tested only at its new position each frame. At full pace the puck travels further in one frame than its own diameter, and a naive overlap check would let it pass clean through your paddle — the classic "it went straight through me" bug that plagues simpler physics demos. The puck also carries a small amount of friction, so a wild rally naturally loses pace over time rather than ricocheting forever at top speed, and it always comes off a paddle hit with at least a minimum amount of pace so it can never end up limply wedged against your paddle doing nothing.
Easy moves slowly across the table and aims with a wide margin of deliberate error, so it genuinely misses shots rather than merely reacting late. Medium moves and reacts faster and tracks the puck's likely path reasonably well, giving a fair, competitive game. Hard moves quickly, predicts where the puck is heading based on its current trajectory rather than simply chasing its current position, and rarely misjudges an interception — beating it consistently takes real angle control, not just speed.
Don't chase the puck around the table — hold a position between the puck and your goal and let it come to you, only committing to a lunge when a shot is actually heading somewhere dangerous. The best attacking shots come from hitting the puck slightly off-centre so it goes in at an angle; a dead-centre hit sends it straight back down the middle where the AI is already standing and ready to intercept. Use the side walls to your advantage too: a banked shot off a wall arrives at the AI's goal from a direction it may not be positioned to cover, especially on higher difficulties where the AI is otherwise hard to beat in a straight line. Finally, remember that your paddle's speed carries directly into the puck, so a controlled, deliberate swing at the right moment beats a fast but wild one.
On a touchscreen, drag your finger anywhere on your half of the table and the paddle follows it exactly, which makes quick defensive saves and sharp-angled shots equally easy to pull off with a thumb. On a desktop, either click-drag with the mouse for the same precise control, or use the arrow keys or WASD for a more deliberate, tactile feel — useful if you prefer not to take your hand off the keyboard between rallies. Because the table geometry is defined as fractions of the play area rather than fixed pixels, the game rescales cleanly to fit anything from a small phone screen to a wide desktop window without distorting the paddles or puck into ellipses.