Controls

Move with the mouse, your finger, or the arrow keys — WASD works too. Space serves. Your paddle is the cyan ring and it can't cross the net.

Shot shaping

Where the ball meets your paddle decides where it goes: contact on the left of the face sends it left, and catching it off the very edge sends it wide of the sideline. How deep you are when you make contact sets how deep the ball lands — reach back for it and you hit deep, take it at the net and it comes back short.

The rules it enforces

The court is 20 by 44 feet with a 7-foot non-volley zone either side of the net, so the rules are geometry rather than decoration. A serve must bounce before the receiver may hit it, a serve landing in the kitchen is a fault, and volleying with your paddle inside the kitchen loses the rally. The opponent is held to all three — it will let a ball bounce rather than fault itself.

What's simplified

Real pickleball uses side-out scoring, where only the serving side can score and a game to 11 can take a while. This uses rally scoring — every rally is a point, first to 11, win by 2 — because it makes a better video game. The serve also isn't required to land in the diagonal service court here, only past the kitchen and inside the lines.

Everything else is enforced for both sides: the two-bounce rule, kitchen volleys, double bounces, balls out, and balls into the net. Gravity runs about 3× real to keep rallies brisk; ball speeds work out to roughly 12–40 mph, which is about right.