🎮 How to Play: Rules, Controls and First-Session Advice

Updated 5 November 2026 · Every rule below was checked against the game source, not copied from a template

Each game opens straight into a canvas, which leaves nowhere to explain the rules. This page spells out what you are trying to achieve, what you can actually do, and where players usually get stuck for all four games, so you can skip the trial and error.

What they share: everything runs in the browser with no download, no account and no in-app purchases; progress stays on your own device; desktop and mobile are both supported.

Pick one by the time you have

1. Star Rift Miner — idle progression

Your ship fires lasers at incoming asteroids automatically. Destroying them yields coins, which buy upgrades to attack, fire rate and crit; stronger stats let you clear asteroids that spawn faster, and the loop accelerates. Bosses appear periodically, and clearing one advances the wave. The long-term goal is a warp: reset the current run in exchange for permanent bonuses that survive every reset.

The loop

1. The ship fires on its own — the first asteroid usually dies within 6–8 seconds.
2. Spend coins on upgrades. Attack and fire rate multiply, so alternating between them beats stacking one.
3. Later waves add shielded, splitting and elite asteroids, plus bosses with distinct phases.
4. Gear, quantum research, the fleet and expeditions unlock as mid- and late-game branches.
5. Warp once the reward threshold is met, then push deeper with the permanent bonuses intact.

Three numbers worth knowing upfront

• Starting attack 25, starting fire rate 2.5; ordinary asteroids have 20 / 36 HP. The opening is never a damage wall.
• Expected DPS is roughly attack × fire rate × (1 + crit chance × (crit multiplier − 1)) — three independent multipliers, so a weak one drags the whole product down.
• Warp rewards scale with a square root. Doubling your coins from 500k to 1M does not double the payout; once you qualify, lingering is usually wasted time.

Go deeper with the beginner's guide, the mechanics breakdown and the progression roadmap.

2. Pixel Breakout — arcade levels

An FC-era style breakout: slide the paddle to return the ball and clear every destructible brick. There are 30 levels and two boss fights; bricks have multiple hit points and falling power-ups change the board.

Controls

Nine power-ups: seven help, two hurt

Good: E wider paddle, S slow ball, M triple ball, T piercing ball, L laser cannon, C sticky paddle, P extra life.
Bad: lowercase e shrinks the paddle, F speeds the ball up. The letter case is easy to miss when a drop is falling.

Brick types

• Normal: multiple hit points, takes several hits.
• Indestructible: cannot be cleared; it only changes the ball's bounce, so route around it.
• Explosive: damages neighbouring bricks — ideal for dense clusters.
• Power-up: always drops an item.
• Boss: has its own health bar and needs sustained damage.

3. Potion Bottle Sort — logic puzzle

Sort the mixed liquids so that every bottle holds exactly one colour, filled to all 4 layers. Each level supplies spare empty bottles as buffer; higher levels add more colours and more bottles.

Four pour rules (each maps to an in-game check)

1. You may only pour from a non-empty bottle, and never into itself.
2. The target must be empty, or its top layer must match the colour being poured; mismatched colours are rejected.
3. A target that already holds 4 layers is full and cannot receive more.
4. While a pour animation is running, or a bottle is being bagged away, that move is temporarily locked until the animation finishes.

4. Puzzle Workshop — casual and custom boards

Pick a built-in image or upload your own photo; the game slices it into a grid, shuffles the pieces, and you drag them back into place. You choose the row/column count and difficulty: fewer pieces is relaxing, more pieces is a real workout.

Controls and behaviour

• Drag with a mouse or a finger; pieces snap into place near their correct slot. Touch screens use swipes.
• All image processing happens locally in a canvas — your uploaded photos are never sent to a server.
• Swap the image and restart at any time; family, pet or holiday photos work well.

Three things common to every game

Saves and privacy

Progress, settings and high scores live in your browser's localStorage and are never uploaded. Clearing site data or using incognito will hide them. See the privacy policy.

Browsers and devices

A modern browser with HTML5 Canvas support (recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari). Phones, tablets and desktops all work; touch games use swipe controls. No plugins required.

Advertising

Ads cover the domain and hosting costs. Some games offer optional rewarded entries — an undo, a revive, or unlocking a spare bottle — but nothing is gated behind them. In the EEA and similar regions the site asks for your cookie choice first, and declining prevents personalised ads.

Where to go next