How to Play
A tray, some holes, and a spring under all of it
Slippy Shapes is a free party game that runs in the browser — nothing to install. A laptop or TV shows a plastic tray punched with shaped holes, seen from above. Everyone joins with their phone, and every phone tips the tray.
Slide a shape onto the hole that is its own shape and hold it there, still, for about a second. A ring closes around it while you hold; when the ring completes, the shape drops in with a clunk and you are handed the next one.
Underneath is a timer you can hear. It ticks from the first second and the ticks close up as it runs down — and every shape that goes home buys you ten more seconds. The clock is not a fuse, it is a wage: a room that is getting shapes home keeps its own round alive, and a room that is stuck runs out fast.
The job is to fill every hole on the tray. Do that and you clear the round, and whatever was left on the clock — up to twenty seconds of it — comes with you into the next one.
If the timer reaches zero with holes still open, the spring lets go and everything you seated is thrown back out. Nobody is thrown out of the game with it: the same tray is offered straight back, with the rounds you already cleared still cleared. Do nothing and it restarts by itself in twelve seconds — the ring on the card is counting — or press TRY AGAIN on the big screen or on any phone in the room. LEAVE is the only thing that ends a run early.
Retries are free, so the number on the leaderboard is not simply how many trays you finished — it is how many you finished first time. Fail a tray and clear it on the third attempt and you have kept your place in the run, but that tray is not on the board.
You are not given the shape you need
The tray only ever hands out circles and triangles. The holes ask for more than that — and the only way to get a square or a diamond is to make one. What it hands out is not a coin flip: if something on the tray is waiting for a partner, the partner is what arrives next, so a room doing everything right is never left waiting on luck.
Smash two of the same shape together, hard, and they become the next shape up.
â—Ź + â—Ź = â–˛ â–˛ + â–˛ = â– â– + â– = â—†
A diamond is the top of the ladder and refuses to fuse — which also means a diamond is four circles and three collisions of work, and that is why the later rounds ask for them.
The smash is measured as how hard the two shapes hit each other — the speed they close on one another, not the speed either happens to be doing. A shape skidding past another at full pelt barely counts; two driven together head-on count for everything. So a forge is a thing you aim, and shapes crossing the tray do not fuse behind your back.
Smash two shapes that do not match and you ruin both into a grey lump that fits no hole on the tray. It is not the end of it: two lumps smashed together come back as something basic. A bad hit costs you time, never a mess you have to tidy.
Only a proper collision does any of this. A gentle nudge is always safe, so shoving something across the tray to get it out of the way will not accidentally destroy it — and in versus, the shape that was travelling faster is the one that owns whatever comes out. Barge someone at speed and you can walk off with their work.
Which is the awkward part of this game: it is won by holding still, and sometimes the only way to get what you need is to charge.
Ready in 30 seconds
- Open the game on the biggest screen you have — a TV's browser, a laptop, or a projector: that is the host screen.
- Everyone else points their phone camera at the QR code on the screen — it opens the controller with the arena code already filled in.
- Type a name, tap JOIN. iPhones will ask for motion access — allow it, that is the tilt sensor.
- The host picks CO-OP or VERSUS. Six phones fit around one tray.
Hold the phone flat, like a tray — because that is what it is. Both directions matter: tilt left and right, and tilt away from you and toward you.
Flat is zero. If you cannot hold your phone flat — lying on a sofa, say — hold it however you actually mean to play and tap 🎯 CALIBRATE. Keep still for half a second and that hold becomes your new level. Tap it again any time it drifts; calibrating while flat puts you back to normal.
Play it with your hands instead
If nobody has a phone to spare, a webcam will do. On the host screen, switch PHONES to HANDS at the top, and allow the camera when the browser asks. There is no QR code and nothing to join — the screen with the camera on it is the whole setup.
- Hold a fist. The tray leans with your hand and every loose shape slides on it at once — that is the whole difficulty, and it is the same by camera as by phone.
- Open your hand for the boost, the shove that gets a shape over a lip it has been nudging at.
- Straight ahead is re-taken when a tray starts, so you begin every tray flat however you happen to be standing.
A small preview appears in the corner. It puts a ring on the hand it is following and a cross where straight ahead is, so you can see both that the camera has you and which way it thinks you are leaning.
One hand for four shapes means you cannot separate them, only choose which lip you are working and let the rest slide. That is true with phones as well; by camera there is nobody to blame.
Co-op by camera is one player. One camera follows one hand — put your other hand down or it will simply be ignored, marked with a faint dot in the preview. VERSUS is two, one each side of the picture. Hand games keep their own leaderboard, so they are never ranked against a room of phones.
Two ways to tip one tray
CO-OP One shape, everybody tipping
The whole room tips the tray together — the shapes answer the average of every phone, so six people leaning the same way is decisive and one person panicking barely registers. There are four shapes loose at once and the tray keeps itself stocked, so there is always something to work with and always something in the way.
The hard part is not steering, it is stopping. To seat a shape everybody has to go level at the same moment and stay there for a second, which is a harder thing to organise than it sounds when the ticking is speeding up.
And the room has to agree on what it is doing. There are four shapes loose at once, the tray only supplies the low ones, so somebody has to call which pair is being smashed into what — while everyone else is tipping the same tray.
VERSUS Same tray, a shape each
2–6 players. Everyone gets their own shape, and your shape answers only to your phone — but it is on the same tray as everyone else's, and they are all in your way.
That is the whole game: to seat a shape you have to hold your phone level, and the moment you do, your shape stops moving while everybody else's is still sliding. Hitting somebody hard enough while they are holding breaks their hold outright and their ring starts again from nothing. Two thirds of the way home counts for nothing at all.
One round of two minutes, and whoever seated the most shapes wins it. Nobody is knocked out and nobody sits anything out — lose your shape to somebody else's forge and a new one arrives three seconds later. The tray is twenty holes, and only six of them can be filled without forging something first, so most of those two minutes is spent making shapes and getting in each other's way.
One button, and you never choose what it does
Attack or defend is not really a choice: you want a shield only while you are holding over a hole, and a shove only while you are not. Those never happen at once. So there is one button, and it is whichever of the two your situation calls for.
| When you are | It is | And it |
|---|---|---|
| Holding over a hole | 🛡 SHIELD | plants your shape so rams bounce off it |
| Anywhere else | đź’Ą CHARGE | throws you the way you are already tilting |
One cooldown covers both, about fifteen seconds, so roughly one hold in three is a protected one.
A shield costs you time
It has to. A hold is one second, and nobody can cross the tray and hit you twice in one second — a free shield would just be a button that says press to score. So a shielded hold takes three seconds instead of one. You are safe, and you are standing still in plain sight for three times as long.
Getting through one takes both a charge and a second run at them:
| What you do | What happens | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ram an unshielded hold | it breaks on the spot |
| 2 | Ram a shielded one | you bounce, nothing happens |
| 3 | Charge into a shielded one | the shield breaks, the hold survives |
| 4 | Ram them again | now the hold breaks |
And losing the shield does not make you quick again: the three seconds were fixed when you raised it. Strip a shield halfway through and they still have a second and a half to stand there with nothing protecting them.
Five trays, and each one wants more than the last
Every tray has the same eight holes. What changes is the mix — how much of the tray has to be built rather than picked up, counted in collisions:
| Tray | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smashes needed | 2 | 4 | 8 | 10 | 15 |
The first tray asks for two squares — enough to learn the forge on, cheap enough to finish. Diamonds arrive on the third, and by the fifth the tray is mostly diamonds, each of them four circles and three collisions of work.
So the difficulty is not a smaller clock or more holes. It is how much forging the tray is asking for, which is why the seconds you bank on an easy tray matter: you are saving them for a tray that will need them.
Clear all five and that is the run. Most rooms will not, and that is the point — the score is how far you got.
What your phone is telling you
- The knob sits where you are tipping the tray. Centre means level — which is the only way anything ever seats.
- The dashed ring is the room's average, in co-op only. If your knob is nowhere near it, that is why the tray is not doing what you want.
- 🎯 CALIBRATE makes the pose you are holding count as level. Hold still for half a second after tapping it.
- The pad is not a map. It shows the tip, not where your shape is. Watch the big screen for that.
Advice from the wall
- Aim early and go level early. A shape arriving fast will overshoot its hole, and you cannot hold what is still moving.
- Approach a hole from the side you can stop on. Coming in downhill is how you end up circling the same well three times.
- Take the easy hole. Any well of the right shape counts, so the one nearest you is worth exactly as much as the awkward one.
- In co-op, agree who calls "level" before the round starts. Six people going flat at different moments is the same as nobody going flat.
- In versus, watch for a rival going still — that is the second they are committed, and the only second where hitting them takes something away. A shielded one is standing there for three of them.
- When the ticking closes up, stop starting new holds you cannot finish. A hold interrupted by the spring is worth nothing.
Friends elsewhere can play too
The host's 📨 INVITE FRIENDS button copies one link, and the link works out what to do with itself. Opened on a computer it mirrors the table live, about a tenth of a second behind. Opened on a phone it explains the missing half: a phone cannot be the arena, so it offers to pass the link to a TV or laptop and then scan the QR that screen puts up.
Small print, big font
- My phone doesn't push anything.
- iPhones need the motion permission — it's asked when you tap JOIN. If you declined it, close the tab, reopen, and allow. Both phones and the game need HTTPS, which this site always uses.
- Do I hold the phone sideways?
- No. Portrait, flat, thumb in the middle. This game reads both tilt axes, so turning the phone would only rotate your controls.
- How many can play?
- Six phones per arena, in either mode: co-op puts all six on one shape, versus gives each their own. Watchers: 5 per arena.
- I keep flying into my own goal.
- Everyone does at first. The table gives nothing back — start your brake about twice as early as feels right and it starts to click.
- Does it cost anything?
- No. It's a free browser game. If it made your evening better, there's a ❤️ button on the host screen.