📘 How to Play Brick Tower

Brick Tower turns the classic brick-breaking game inside out. Your goal is not to clear the wall — it is to build a tower out of the bricks you break. A brick you hit does not disappear: it comes loose and falls. Move your tray underneath, catch it, and it joins your tower. Get the tower past the dashed blue goal line and the level is done.

1. Tap the screen or press space; the ball launches from your tray.
2. Bounce the ball with the tray. Hit it in the middle and the ball goes straight up; hit it near the edge and it flies sideways — you pick the angle.
3. The brick you hit falls below where you hit it. So choosing which brick to break is also choosing where you will have to run.
4. When a brick settles on the tray or on top of your tower it locks in and gets a gold outline. Locked bricks travel with the tray.
5. The bar on the left shows how close your tower is to the goal; the top right shows how many bricks you have collected.
6. Keep the tower above the line and the level ends; the goal rises and the ball speeds up.

⚖️ The real decision in the game

The ball pulls you one way, the falling brick another. You cannot serve both, and the game is built that way on purpose. Losing works differently for each: if the ball drops you lose a life; if the tower breaks you only lose progress. So "do I save the ball or catch the brick?" comes up several times a round and the right answer keeps changing. The taller the tower, the heavier the tray: turns get slower, and a long dash across the screen knocks a brick off the top. Losing the tower is never an accident — it is a decision you made.

👶 What to expect from ages 7-12

In the first rounds most children only chase the ball and catch bricks by luck. Then they notice they can catch bricks on purpose, forget the ball entirely, and burn through their lives. Real learning happens in the third stage: estimating how long the ball will stay in the air and using that gap to get under the brick. Ages 7-8 usually get stuck in stage two; 9-10 year olds find stage three by themselves. The sticking point is almost always the same — noticing that a loaded tray moves more slowly.

🏠 At home and in class

While your child plays, ask one question: "what are you saving right now?" Saying the decision out loud makes the choice inside the game visible. A two-player round also works: one counts the bricks in the tower, the other counts the lives spent, then talk about which was worth more. In class, project it and let the group choose which brick to break — that teaches thinking ahead about where it will land.

💡 Tips

• Catch bricks in the middle of the tray. Bricks caught near the edge lean the tower, and a leaning tower comes apart more easily.
• With a tower on the tray, the ball bounces off the top of the tower, not the flat tray, so angles get harder to read. Meet the ball earlier as you near the goal.
• Breaking bricks at the edges of the wall keeps sending you to the edges of the screen. Bricks in the middle are easier to catch.
• The ball slows down as the tower rises — that is not a bug, it is extra time given to you.
• If a brick gets away, do not dash after it. There are 45 bricks in the wall; waiting for the next one is cheaper than rebuilding the tower.

🧩 As the levels go up

Each level raises the goal line by 24 pixels and speeds the ball up a little. Bricks fall slowly for the first three levels; from level four the fall speeds up and your catching window narrows. If the wall runs out a fresh one is built, so the game never deadlocks. You have three lives, and a life is only lost when the ball leaves the bottom of the screen.