Ricochet strategy

Ricochet looks like an aiming game and is really an economics game. Every shot has an opportunity cost of 250 points — the bonus for leaving it unused — so a shot has to earn more than that to be worth taking at all. Once you internalise that, your aim changes completely.

Shoot legs, never prizes

The cores sit on top. Hitting one directly destroys one block for 500 points times whatever chain you had, which is usually ×1 because it was your first contact. Hitting the supporting block underneath can drop the core, the block beside it and everything above — a five- or six-block chain, with the core arriving late in the chain at ×5 or ×6.

Same shot, same core, four times the score. This is the whole game.

Glass is a detonator, not a target

Glass has very low health and high point value, so it feels like a great target. Its real value is structural: it fails instantly under load, so a glass block anywhere in a stack is a fault line. Break the glass low in a tower and everything above it falls, damaging itself on the way down and extending your chain for free.

Conversely, a tower resting on stone will not fall. Do not waste shots trying — hit it high, or hit the tower next to it and let debris do the work.

Every shot has an opportunity cost of 250 points.

Understand what damage actually is

Damage scales with the projectile's speed at the moment of impact, and every impact bleeds most of that speed. This has two consequences worth memorising:

• Your first contact is by far your most powerful. Choose it deliberately — do not clip a corner of glass on the way to the block you wanted.
• Falling blocks deal damage too, proportional to their landing speed. A stone block dropped from the top of a tower will destroy timber underneath it. Height is a weapon.

Take the towers in the right order

Debris travels away from you. Collapsing the near tower can scatter blocks into the middle one, softening it for free; collapsing the far tower does nothing for the others. Work near to far unless the far tower is visibly the most fragile.

Count your shots against 250

Before the fifth and sixth shots, ask whether the shot will realistically score more than 250. A shot that will destroy one timber block at ×1 (60 points) is strictly worse than not taking it. This mostly comes up at the end of a round when one core is stubbornly balanced — and the honest answer is usually to stop.

The exception: a core is worth 500 at ×1, so a shot with a genuine chance of finishing the last core is always worth taking.

Read the preview properly

The dotted trajectory shows the true parabola. What it does not show is what happens after the first impact. Use the preview to pick your entry point into the structure, and think one bounce ahead about where the energy goes after that.

What a good round looks like

Three cores down is the baseline. Three cores down with two shots spare, off two large collapses, is roughly double that score. Anyone clearing consistently in four shots is aiming at legs.