Royal Smash tips: how to clear the table with the shots you have

How a level works in Cannon Smash Playground

Each level puts toy-like pieces on one or more tables: jam jars in six colors, tin cans, wooden crates and cylinders, stone blocks and ice blocks. You aim the cannon, fire a ball, and the ball flies into the scene with real 3D physics. It can hit one piece directly, bounce into a second, or knock out a support so that everything above it slides over the edge.

The goal is simple and strict: every target shape has to leave its stand before the Shoots counter reaches zero. Breaking a piece or making it wobble does not count. What counts is where it ends up. That is the main difference from Knock Balls and Cannon Balls 3D, where you smash through block towers. Here the table is the target zone, and a crate that tips but stays on the edge is still a crate you have to deal with.

Aiming is quick to learn. On desktop you move the mouse to aim and click to fire; drag and release works too. On a phone or tablet you tap or drag above the lower dead zone. There is a restart button for the current level whenever an attempt goes wrong.

Hit the support, not the piece on top

The instinct in any cannon game is to shoot at the thing you want gone. In a stacking level that is usually the most expensive way to play. A jar on the top of a tower only takes itself away. The block under it takes the jar, the can beside it and anything else resting on that level.

So before each shot, look at the construction from the bottom up. Find the piece that the most other pieces depend on, then aim low at it. When a support leaves, the stack above tends to fall together, and gravity does the rest of the work for free. A single well-placed low shot can do what three careful top shots cannot.

The first 160 levels are built around symmetric constructions, and symmetry helps you here. If the left and right halves mirror each other, the weak point on one side has a twin on the other. Clear one half with a support shot and you already know where the next shot goes.

Light pieces on the edge, heavy pieces in the middle

Not every piece needs the same effort. Jars and cans standing near the edge of a table fall with a light touch: a glancing ball or a nudge from a falling neighbour is often enough. Stone blocks and wooden pieces in the middle of the table are a different job, and they are the ones that decide whether you finish with shots to spare.

Plan your shots in that order of difficulty. Use your strongest, cleanest angles on the heavy pieces in the middle, because those are the only ones that really need them. The light edge pieces will often go over as a side effect of a bigger hit. Spending a full shot on a lone jar that was one wobble away from falling is how levels end with one heavy block left and an empty counter.

Read the bounce before you choose the next shot

The ball does not stop at the first thing it touches. It keeps its momentum through the scene and bounces, so the angle of a hit matters as much as the target. A shot straight through the middle of two shapes can make both sway, but an angled hit often transfers more force to one of them and sends it further.

Use your first shot on a new level as information as well as damage. Watch where the ball goes after the impact: which way it deflects, what it hits next, where it drops. That tells you how the construction will react to the next shot better than any amount of staring at it. If the first shot goes badly, the restart button is cheap, and a second attempt with that knowledge is usually cleaner.

Wide levels: play the whole arena

After the opening stretch, the game combines its piece sets into larger layouts across several tables. This is where shot counts get tight, because clearing one object at a time no longer adds up. On a wide level, look for a move that affects more than one table: a ball that clears a piece on the near table and carries on into the next one, or a falling stack that knocks into a neighbour on its way down.

Difficulty in the campaign rises in short waves, and after every five levels there is a gentler one. If a board feels unfair, it is probably near the top of a wave. Restart, try a different first shot, and remember that the next breather is never far away.

Shots, coins and the Out of moves screen

Every win pays 15 coins, and when a rewarded ad is available you can double that reward. The coins have one important use: when you run out of shots, the Out of moves screen offers three extra shots for the current attempt for 200 coins. If you have fewer than 200 coins and a rewarded ad is available, you can watch it for those three shots instead.

That makes a simple rule worth following: keep 200 coins in reserve. Three extra shots on a nearly cleared board are worth far more than a restart, because the hard part of the level is already done. Spending coins early, or letting the balance drift below 200, means that the next close finish becomes a full replay instead.

Play Cannon Smash Playground free in your browser

Cannon Smash Playground is an independent crokocat game in the style of Royal Smash! (Physics Puzzle) by Cypher Games, and it is not affiliated with Cypher Games, Voodoo or Famobi. It runs in any modern browser on Windows, Mac, Chromebook and Linux as well as on phones and tablets, so it is an easy way to play a game like Royal Smash or Knock Balls on a PC without installing anything. Besides the 500-level campaign there is a daily puzzle picked by the date, which gives you one more layout each day without touching your campaign progress. Level progress and coins are saved in your browser, and if you sign in on crokocat they travel with your account.

If you like the feeling of one shot setting off a chain, Bounce Breaker on the same portal has you firing a fan of balls at a wall of numbered bricks, and Brickstorm is the classic paddle-and-ball brick breaker.

Bounce BreakerOne more volleyPlay now

BrickstormSmash every brickPlay now

Frequently asked questions

Guides & tips

• Ballz strategy: the angles that turn one shot into fifty hits
• Brickstorm: tips, angles and how to clear every brick

Play it here

• Cannon Smash Playground — Aim the cannon and topple colorful towers
• Bounce Breaker — One more volley
• Brickstorm — Smash every brick