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How to Play Orbeats

Everything you need to know to start playing and start winning.

The basics

Orbeats is a real-time multiplayer game where you control a blob on a large 2D arena shared with other players. Each session lasts three minutes. Your goal is to grow as large as possible by eating pellets and other players, and finish the session with the highest score.

No account or download is needed. Enter a name on the start screen and press Play. You will immediately join a live session already in progress.

Movement

Your blob always moves toward your cursor. On desktop, just move your mouse and the blob follows. On mobile, drag your finger across the screen. The blob never stops — it continuously glides in the direction you point.

Speed depends on your size. Small blobs are quick and agile. As your blob grows it becomes slower but harder to avoid. Use this to your advantage: stay small and fast when hunting, or build mass to become an imposing presence that smaller players fear to approach.

Eating pellets

Pellets are scattered across the arena and respawn continuously. There are three types:

Tip: In the early seconds of a session, ignore other players and focus entirely on pellets. Building mass quickly puts you in a dominant position for the rest of the game.

Eating other players

You can eat another player — bot or human — if your blob is at least 5% larger than theirs. Move over them to absorb their entire mass. This is the fastest way to grow, especially mid-session when other blobs are already large.

When you eat another player you gain a portion of their mass. If they had split cells at the time, those are absorbed too. Eaten players respawn after a short delay.

Tip: Chase players who are close to your size but just smaller. Do not waste time chasing players far below you — the mass gain is minimal and you may miss larger opportunities nearby.

Splitting

Press Space on desktop, or double-tap on mobile, to split your blob in two. Half of your mass launches forward at high speed in the direction of your cursor.

Splitting is useful for:

After splitting, your two cells begin merging back together automatically after a few seconds. While split, both cells move toward your cursor independently, which takes a little practice to control. You can have multiple split cells active at once.

Tip: Split only when you are sure you can reach your target. A split blob is temporarily smaller and more vulnerable. If you miss, retreat quickly and wait for your cells to merge.

The Bounty system

Thirty seconds after you join a session, a bounty target is assigned to you. A toast notification appears at the top of the screen identifying which player is your target, and a coloured arrow on the screen edge points toward them at all times.

If you eat your bounty target you receive a +20% bonus on top of their normal mass value. A new target is assigned every 30 seconds, keeping the objective fresh throughout the session.

Tip: Bounty targets are chosen based on score proximity — your target will usually be close to your current rank. This makes the bounty system fair while also creating natural rivalries between similarly-matched players.

The session timer and end game

A progress bar in the bottom-right corner shows time remaining in the current session. Sessions last three minutes. When the timer runs out, the session ends for all players simultaneously.

After the session ends (or after you are eaten), a multiplier mini-game appears. A spinning wheel determines a score multiplier between x1.0 and x3.0. Your final score is your raw mass multiplied by this value, so a strong performance combined with a high multiplier can push you near the top of the daily leaderboard even if you were mid-table during the session.

Strategy tips

  1. Hug the edges early. The arena borders are less contested than the centre. Collect pellets safely while others fight in the middle.
  2. Watch the leaderboard. The live leaderboard shows who is large and where you rank. Avoid the top player until you are confident you can split-catch them.
  3. Use split defensively. If a larger player is chasing you, split away at the right moment to escape. The burst of speed often buys enough time to reach safety.
  4. Decay management. Large blobs slowly lose mass over time. Stay active and keep eating to counteract decay at high mass.
  5. Chase the bounty. The +20% bounty bonus is significant. If your target is nearby and smaller, prioritise them over random pellet farming.
  6. End sessions alive. Dying near the end of a session is costly — you lose your accumulated mass and your multiplier applies to a smaller base score.