Ball Battle is a free online ball eat ball game against computer opponents. You steer one blob around an arena much larger than the screen, hoovering up pellets and swallowing any rival ball clearly smaller than you. The move that makes it a game rather than a chase is the split: press space and half your mass launches forward, doubling your reach for a second and leaving you as two small balls for the next seven. Every capture is that trade. Spikes scattered around the arena burst anything big enough to swallow them, so the biggest ball on the board cannot simply drive in a straight line, and mass above a threshold slowly bleeds away, so sitting on a lead is not a plan either. The camera zooms out as you grow, which means getting bigger also means seeing more of the arena and being seen from further away. Six arenas, from a practice yard with two grazing rivals to a crowded bowl where most of them split at you on sight. Single player, no login, no download.
How to play Ball Battle
- You are the green ball marked YOU. It always follows your pointer, or the arrow keys and WASD.
- The small coloured dots are pellets. Rolling over one adds a little mass — this is where most of your growth comes from early on.
- A rival ball with a green ring is small enough to swallow. One with a red ring can swallow you.
- Eating needs a clear size advantage and real overlap: their centre must be well inside you, so touching rims is a near miss, not a capture.
- Press space, or the SPLIT button, to throw half your mass forward toward the pointer. That is how you catch something faster than you.
- Split halves cannot merge back for seven seconds, and while you are split each half can be eaten separately.
- Green spiked circles burst any ball big enough to swallow them into several pieces. Small balls pass over them safely.
- Reach the target mass shown in the header before the clock runs out. Losing every ball you own ends the run immediately.
Tips
- Pellets are safe growth and rivals are fast growth. Early on, farm; once you outrank someone, hunt.
- Only split when the target cannot escape. A split you miss leaves you as two halves in front of everything on the board that was waiting for exactly that.
- Use spikes as cover. A ball twice your size cannot follow you past one without bursting, so a spike field is the safest place on the map when you are behind.
- Watch the zoom. When the view widens you have grown — and so has the distance from which rivals can see and reach you.
- Mass above the decay floor bleeds away, so a lead you stop playing shrinks by itself. Keep moving toward the target instead of defending a number.
- Corners are where splits land. Pushing a rival toward a wall removes half their escape directions before you commit.
- After splitting, steer both halves the same way. They drift apart on their own while the cooldown runs, and a stray half is free food for someone.
- On the last arenas the rivals split at you. Keep enough distance that a split cannot reach you, which is roughly four of your own radii.
FAQ
Is Ball Battle free to play?
Yes. It runs in the browser with nothing to install, no account and nothing to buy. All six arenas are included and unlock as you clear them.
Is this multiplayer?
No — and the page does not pretend otherwise. Every rival is a computer opponent running on your own machine, so there is nothing to sign into, no lobby, and no waiting. The opponents get sharper each arena rather than getting more numerous.
What exactly does splitting do?
It halves each of your balls and launches the new half toward your pointer at high speed. That is the only way to reach something moving as fast as you are. The cost is real: the halves cannot merge back for seven seconds, and until they do each one can be eaten on its own.
Why did I not eat that ball when I clearly touched it?
Because touching is not eating. You need both a clear size advantage — around 18% more mass — and enough overlap that their centre is well inside your circle. That rule is what makes near misses readable instead of random.
What are the green spiky circles?
Spikes. Any ball big enough to swallow one bursts into several pieces on contact, so they are dangerous to the leader and completely safe for anyone small. They are the reason a big ball has to steer.
Why is my mass going down when I am not being eaten?
Mass above a threshold slowly decays. Without it the correct strategy once you are ahead is to stop playing and run out the clock, which is not a game. The bleed is small — it only bites if you stop growing.
Do the rivals actually get better, or just bigger?
Both, and the skill part is measured rather than claimed. The difficulty dial controls how often a rival takes an attack it can see and how carefully it picks a pellet, and the test suite compares total rival mass over a fixed window at the lowest and highest settings to check the dial moves in the right direction.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. Drag anywhere in the arena to steer and use the SPLIT button under it. The camera crops to whatever shape the screen is, so portrait works without rotating.