Guide
Everything the game does, in the order you will run into it. The same pages are in the app under Help — nothing here is hidden behind a tutorial.
Press and hold anywhere on the screen — you do not have to touch the frame itself — and drag. The frame keeps the offset it had when you first touched down, so it never snaps under your thumb and your aim stays where you put it.
Let go and the frame stops. It cannot leave the screen, so the edges are a hard limit on where you can retreat to. Flick as hard as you like: the frame catches up to your finger rather than teleporting to it, so a wall can never sweep straight past the ball.
The ball is not attached to any of this. It carries its own speed and direction, bounces off solid wood, and does not care where you are dragging.
Two numbers, tracked every run:
| Number | How it goes up |
|---|---|
| Bounces | +1 each time the ball strikes a solid wooden section. One continuous contact only counts once, so sliding along a plank does not farm points. Everything the ball catches adds to this same number. |
| Survival time | Runs from the moment the round starts until the ball escapes. |
Your best of each is kept on the device, per rating band. They are tracked separately, so a long careful run and a short frantic one can both be personal records.
The playfield is not empty, and the ball is the only thing that can touch any of it. Moving the frame to put the ball somewhere is the whole game; these are the reasons to.
| Kind | What it does | Worth |
|---|---|---|
| Falling | Nuts and cones drop from the top, one at a time, every two or three seconds. One that reaches the bottom uncaught bursts where it lands. | 1 |
| Blown | Leaves and seeds cross sideways on the wind, in gusts of four to ten flying close together at the same speed. The slowest things in the game, and the easiest to line up. | 2 |
| Growing | Berries and mushrooms sprout along the bottom and swell where they stand, reaching full size in fourteen seconds. Six at most are ever out at once, and they do not go anywhere. | 1–5, by ripeness |
| Golden orb | Repairs the frame instead of scoring. See below. | — |
| Chain, splitter, magnet, boxit | Four objects that cross the field and change the run rather than paying for it — see below. | — |
Nothing is ever taken off you. A nut that lands, a leaf that blows past and a berry left to ripen all cost you the catch and nothing else — which makes leaving a berry to fatten a real decision rather than a risk.
Each of the six backdrops brings its own set of items, drawn for it: acorns and blackberries in the forest, frosted cones in the snow, husks and bone in the desert, glowing minerals in the cave. 279 of them in all, and each one shatters into its own colours when the ball takes it. Each place plays its own music too, not only its own art. Every one of them is pictured here.
Besides the orb, three objects drift through a run. All three are exactly the ball’s size and turn slowly as they go, so they read as one family: things you have to decide about. None of them pays a point on contact. What each one does is change the run you are in.
Hit it and the frame locks where it stands for 2 seconds. A golden countdown appears in the middle of the screen. Nothing else stops: the ball keeps flying, the clock keeps running, the wood keeps opening. You are simply made to watch.
It is the only thing in the game that takes the frame away from the finger holding it, so it is worth steering wide of even at the cost of a catch.
A cracked stone. Your ball bounces off it and the stone opens into a second ball. From then on the run ends only when both are gone, which is close to a second life — but it is a second life you have to steer, with one frame.
Two balls bounce off each other, and no stone appears while you already have 2. Lose one and another can turn up.
The rarest thing you will see, roughly once every 45–75 seconds. Hit it and every item on screen is dragged to your ball and popped as it arrives, each one paying what it was worth.
The near things land first and the far ones trail in behind, so it is worth taking when the field is full — the middle of a gust is the best moment there is.
The chain again, but glowing gold, and about as rare as the magnet — every 45–75 seconds. Hit it and chains fall across every hole in the frame, corners included, for 2 seconds.
The frame still moves and the wood still rots; you simply cannot lose the ball while the chains are up. A small number counts the seconds down. It is two seconds to stop steering and go and take something.
Covered in full below. It is the only object that repairs the frame, and like the rest it pays nothing on contact.
Every gust of wind carries one item that glows gold and trails a short golden wake. It is an ordinary leaf in every other way — it blows the same, and on its own it is worth the same 2.
Catch that one and the whole gust pops, one after another, each paying its own worth. A ten-strong gust taken at the gold one is ten catches from a single interception, which makes reaching that particular leaf the most valuable thing you can do with a gust.
It is always a gust, never a falling nut or a berry. Those arrive in ones and twos, so there would be nothing for a gold one to set off.
Catch two acorns back to back and the second pays double. The third doubles again, and so on up to 32 times, where it stops climbing — with the multiplier written over each catch in gold and a chime to match. Catch anything else and it starts over at one.
A gust is all of one kind, which is the point: threading the ball through a gust catching leaf after leaf is worth far more than the same leaves caught with anything in between.
Every side of the frame starts whole. Nothing opens on a clock — a plank cracks only where the ball actually hits it, and the third crack breaks it, leaving a hole where that plank was. Cut into five to eight planks of random widths every round, a side breaks unevenly: some collapsed planks leave a hole wide enough for the ball, others do not, and you can see which by looking at the gap.
There is no permanently solid corner holding the box together, and there never was one to lose: a corner is just a gap too narrow for the ball on its own, and it only opens up once the planks on both sides of it are gone. Late runs are about watching those corners, not just the walls.
Wood does not grow back on its own, and it does not wait for the ball to move clear either — the one repair in the game rebuilds a plank right under the ball, on purpose, to bounce it back in. See the golden orb below.
Each hit leaves its mark on the plank it landed on, and the mark right before a plank breaks always looks the most battered, at any rating. A glance at the wood is enough to tell you which one is about to go.
Standing still is the one exception to “nothing opens on a clock”. Leave the frame exactly where it is and 10 seconds later every surviving plank takes a crack at once — a puff of dust off the wood warns you 2 seconds before it lands — and it keeps happening, on the same clock, for as long as you hold still. Move the frame at all and the clock resets. The one break: while a boxit has your frame chained, the clock is frozen too — you already cannot move it, so it does not also decay under you.
A glowing orb drifts into play from time to time — one at a time, never more. Collecting it banks a rescue charge; you can hold up to 3 at once, shown as a row of small orbs along the bottom of the screen. Spend one and the plank the ball was about to escape through rebuilds on the spot, right under the ball, and bounces it back inside instead. While you are holding a charge the ball itself shows it too, flecked with gold as it rolls.
The catch is that you cannot collect it yourself. The orb ignores the frame completely: it drifts straight through wood and openings alike, and moving the frame onto it does nothing at all. Only the ball can take it.
So collecting one means steering the entire frame to put the ball on a path that crosses the orb — usually while at least one wide-open side is pointed somewhere you would rather it was not.
Missing costs you nothing. The orb drifts off the screen, is removed, and another is scheduled later. There is no penalty for letting a bad one go, which makes ignoring the greedy ones a real strategy rather than a concession.
Two separate numbers, and they are easy to confuse. Levels are a record of time put in: every run pays a point of experience a second, plus ten for finishing at all, so even a four-second run moves the bar. Levels cost more as they go — a hundred for level 2, two hundred more for level 3, three hundred more for level 4 — they only ever climb, and new ones unlock things to look at: the Autumn, Moonlit and Snow Cabin backdrops at levels 3, 8 and 15, and a new wooden frame every few levels from the second on. The Desert and the Crystal Cave, a temple frame and a golden ball come with Boxscape Premium instead, a one-time purchase that also removes the ads between runs. Nothing you unlock or buy changes how the game plays or scores; it changes what you look at while it does.
Your rating is how well you play, and it moves both ways. Surviving about ninety seconds is par: beat that and it climbs, fall short and it drops. The game serves a difficulty to match it: the ball reaches full speed in as little as ninety seconds for the strongest players and as long as three minutes for players still finding their feet, and a plank takes fewer hits to break the higher your rating climbs.
| Band | Rating |
|---|---|
| Rookie | below 840 |
| Amateur | 840 and up |
| Skilled | 1080 and up |
| Pro | 1320 and up |
| Elite | 1560 and up |
You are promoted the moment you cross a line and have to fall fifty back below it to be demoted, so a rating sitting on a boundary does not bounce you about. Best time and best bounces are kept per band, so a promotion never means chasing a record you set at an easier setting.
On Android the game is free and pays for itself with ads. None of them play while the ball is in the frame, and two of the three only play if you ask.
A continued run is played for the pleasure of it. It pays experience like any other, but it stays off the leaderboards and your personal records, its rating change is skipped, and the trophies judged on one run's time or bounces do not count it, so nobody's place on a board was bought with an ad. The results board says CONTINUED beside the time when that is what happened. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland the game asks your permission before showing any ad at all; the privacy policy has the detail.
There are 118 trophies. Some are for a single run, some for lifetime totals, some for coming back the next day. They arrive mid-run on a card that flies past without stopping the game and collect in a row under the plaques. Awards is what you hold, one card each; the Gallery, reached from Awards, is the whole catalogue with the ones you have not won dimmed rather than hidden, so you can see what the game wants from you.
Three global boards sit behind the Scores icon: Time ranks the longest run, Bounces the highest count, and Trophies the biggest shelf — a total that only ever climbs. Your own row is always shown, wherever it ranks, at its true position rather than renumbered to fit. The heading reads GLOBAL SCORES over real players and BEST SCORES over the game's own five fixed rivals, so the two are never confused. A run you continued by watching an ad is not sent to any of the three.
The game names you the first time it runs and never asks for anything else. What that means for your data is in the privacy policy.
Boxscape