Putt

📖 Strategy guide: How to beat par in Putt: bank shots, soft putts and the robot's gaps

How to play

A round is six holes of mini golf seen from above. Press anywhere on the course, drag back and let go: the ball leaves in the opposite direction, like a slingshot, and a longer drag is a harder putt. The dashed line shows the aim and how far the ball would roll on open green (it ends in a bar where it would meet a wall first), the bar under the course the power; a very short drag is cancelled. On a keyboard, ← and → turn the aim by 3° (15° with Shift), ↑ and ↓ change the power, Space or Enter putts. The ball bounces off the border and the dark blocks and loses a quarter of its speed into the wall each time. Your score is the total number of strokes over the six holes, and lower is better. The scorecard at the end compares every hole with its par.

Sand, water and the cup

Sand brakes the ball five times as hard as the green. A ball that rolls into water is put back where that putt was played from, and the stroke still counts. The cup takes a ball that is over it and moving at less than about a third of full speed; a faster ball rolls across and carries on. Each hole allows eight strokes: after the eighth the ball is picked up and the hole is scored as 8.

How the courses are made

The daily course is generated from the date, so everyone plays the same six holes, and it changes at midnight UTC. Before a hole is kept, a robot plays it: from the tee it tries a putt every three degrees at eight strengths, then does the same from the best places those putts leave the ball, for up to four strokes. The fewest strokes it needs is the par, always 2, 3 or 4, and later holes have more walls. A hole the robot aces is thrown away, so a hole-in-one always means you found a line it missed.

Tips

• Walls are there to be used: when the straight line is blocked, bank the ball off a wall or the border.
• Putt softly near the cup. A ball that arrives fast rolls over it, and the comeback putt costs a stroke.
• When water lies beyond your target, play short of it: a short putt costs nothing, a wet one costs a stroke and gains no ground.
• A ball in sand needs far more power than the distance suggests.