Aim and shoot bubbles, join three or more of one colour to pop them and clear the board. Levels add colours and push new rows in faster.
What is Bubble Popper?
Bubble Popper is a bubble shooter game: you aim a launcher at the bottom of the screen, fire coloured bubbles into a cluster hanging from the top, and pop groups of three or more bubbles of the same colour until the board is empty. Bubbles that lose their connection to the top fall away, so one well placed shot can bring down a large part of the board.
There is no timer. The pressure comes from the ceiling: shots that pop nothing slowly push the whole cluster down toward the dashed line at the bottom, and the game ends when a bubble reaches it.
How to play Bubble Popper
The board is 10 bubbles wide and 14 rows deep, and the rows are offset like a honeycomb, so each bubble touches up to six neighbours. You aim within a wide arc, from almost flat to the left to almost flat to the right. A dotted guide line shows where the bubble will travel, including one bounce off a side wall.
A fired bubble flies in a straight line, bounces off the side walls and sticks as soon as it touches another bubble or the top of the board. If it joins a group of three or more bubbles of its own colour, the whole group pops. After the pop, every bubble that no longer has a path of touching bubbles to the top row falls off the board.
Each popped bubble and each dropped bubble is worth 100 points. A shot that pops a group of three and drops twelve hanging bubbles scores 1,500, so drops are where big scores come from.
Every shot that pops nothing adds to a hidden counter. When the counter reaches the limit for the level, the whole cluster shifts down a row and a fresh row is added above it. Popping a group does not reset the counter, so careless shots add up even if you pop something in between. Clear every bubble to finish the level; if any bubble reaches the bottom row, the game is over.
Bubble shooter strategy: how to clear the board
Shoot for drops. Before each shot, look for a small group of matching bubbles that holds up a larger cluster. Popping those three or four bubbles cuts the cluster loose, and every bubble in it falls for 100 points. Working from the top of the board down creates these chances more often than clearing the bottom edge.
Use the walls. Bubbles hidden behind others are often reachable with a bank shot. The guide line shows one bounce, so you can line up the angle exactly. Wall shots are also the way to reach the far corners of the top rows.
Read the next bubble. The small bubble beside the launcher shows the colour that follows the current one. If the current colour has no good spot, place it where it will not block anything, such as on top of a group of the same colour that is still too small to pop, and plan your next shot around the bubble you know is coming.
Count your misses. Since only shots that pop nothing bring the ceiling down, what usually loses a level is a run of wasted shots. When you have no match, park the bubble next to bubbles of the same colour so that the following shot of that colour finishes the group.
Keep colours apart. The launcher only deals colours that are still on the board. As you clear a colour completely, it stops appearing, which makes the rest of the level easier. Finishing off a colour that has only a few bubbles left is often worth more than a bigger pop elsewhere.
Levels and difficulty
Clearing the board starts the next level. Level 1 starts with 4 rows and 4 colours, and the ceiling drops after 7 shots that pop nothing. As you go on, the starting cluster grows to 8 rows, the colours rise to 7, and from level 8 the ceiling drops after only 3 such shots.
Every new game starts from level 1, and your best score is saved on your device. Other games in the genre add special bubbles, bombs or limited shot counts; this one keeps the classic rules with growing colour counts and a faster ceiling.
Where bubble shooter games come from
The aim-and-match bubble format goes back to a 1994 arcade puzzle game from the Japanese company Taito, which used characters from its earlier platform games. The idea of a launcher at the bottom, sticky bubbles and groups of three popping became a standard, and countless versions followed on home consoles, PCs, phones and the web.
Our Bubble Popper is built on an open-source HTML5 bubble shooter example by Rembound.com, released under the MIT license. We rewrote it for Hevagames with a board sized for phones, levels, touch aiming and drawn bubbles.
Play Bubble Popper free on Hevagames
Bubble Popper runs in the browser on phones, tablets and computers, with no download. On a touch screen you drag to aim and lift your finger to shoot. With a mouse you aim by moving it and click to fire. On a keyboard the arrow keys or A and D turn the launcher and Space, the up arrow or W shoots.
Every colour also has its own symbol drawn on the bubble, so the game can be played by people who find some colours hard to tell apart. You can pause with P, Esc or the pause button, and the game follows the site's light or dark theme.
How to play
- 1Aim the shooter at the bottom and fire the bubble. It bounces off the side walls and sticks where it touches.
- 2Three or more touching bubbles of the same colour pop. Bubbles left hanging with no link to the top fall off.
- 3Every popped or dropped bubble is worth 100 points.
- 4Shots that pop nothing count up; after several, every bubble moves down a row and a new row appears at the top.
- 5Clear the board to start the next level. If a bubble reaches the dashed line at the bottom, the game is over.
Controls
Tips
- Bounce shots off the walls to reach bubbles behind others.
- Popping a bubble that holds up a big group drops the whole group for extra points.
- The small bubble next to the shooter shows the colour that comes next.
- Each colour has its own symbol, so you can play without telling colours apart.
