Marbles

How to play Marbles

1. Thirteen marbles in an X. The target marbles start in the middle of the ring: one in the centre and three on each leg of an X, 3 inches apart.
2. A shooter each. Each player has their own shooter, a bigger marble: orange for Orange, purple for Purple. Target marbles are ⅝ inch across and the shooters ¾ inch, the largest the tournament rules allow, so a shooter is heavier than the marbles it hits.
3. Knuckle down on the line. Every turn starts outside the ring. Put your shooter anywhere on the white ring line, all the way round, and shoot it into the ring from there.
4. Knock marbles out. A marble counts as soon as more than half of it is over the line, and it's yours even if it bounces off the wooden border and rolls back in. One shot can knock out several.
5. Shoot again. If a shot knocks at least one marble out and your shooter stays inside the ring, your turn goes on: shoot again from the spot where your shooter stopped.
6. The end of your turn. Your turn ends when a shot knocks no marble out, or when your shooter rolls out of the ring. You keep any marbles that went out on that last shot. Your shooter is picked up, and your rival knuckles down on the line.
7. Win. The first player to knock out 7 of the 13 marbles wins. Seven in your first turn is called a stick.
8. Who goes first. The first shot swaps from game to game. At the tournament, players lag for it: both toss their shooters towards a line, and the closer one shoots first.

The ring and the marbles

The game is built to the tournament's sizes, seen from above (when the view is zoomed out, the marbles are drawn bigger so you can see them).

A ring 10 feet across is big next to a marble, so while you aim the view closes in: from the line on your shooter and the marbles left in the ring, and inside the ring on your shooter and the marbles near it. A small map in the corner shows the whole ring, and the magnifier button (or the Z key) shows the whole ring on the screen.

Controls

• Choose your spot. At the start of a turn your shooter sits on the ring line. Drag it along the line, or tap anywhere on the line, to knuckle down there. Little arrows beside the shooter show that it slides.
• Aim and shoot. Pull back from anywhere on the screen, away from where you want to shoot, and let go. The further you pull, the harder the shot. Dots show the way your shooter will go; a dotted circle shows where it would touch a marble, and short coloured dots show the way that marble would go. The meter on the right shows how far the shot would roll on an empty ring.
• From inside the ring. After a marble goes out, you shoot from where your shooter stopped, in any direction.
• Keyboard. A and D slide your shooter round the line, the left and right arrows aim, up and down set the power, and Space or Enter shoots. Hold Shift for fine steps. Z shows the whole ring.

Every shot, yours or the computer's, has a small wobble in direction and strength, as a real thumb does. From the line, 5 feet from the middle, it can make the difference between a full hit and a glancing one, so long shots are never quite sure; close up, the wobble hardly shows.

Computer levels

The computer sees the same ring you do. It works out which marbles it could knock out, from which spot and how hard, and from Medium up it tries its best ideas on a copy of the ring with the game's own physics before it shoots.

• Easy goes for the marble that looks easiest and gives it a good hard knock. Its aim and strength are often off, and it doesn't think about where its shooter will stop.
• Medium aims better, chooses how hard to hit and gives some thought to where its shooter stops, so it more often stays in the ring for another shot.
• Hard tries more spots on the line and more ways out for each marble, thinks harder about where its shooter will stop, and tries not to leave marbles near the line for you.
• Expert plans the same way with a steadier thumb, and tries more shots before it picks one.

In tests where each level played itself, Easy knocked out about 0.45 marbles a turn, Medium about 0.6, Hard about 0.9 and Expert about 1.3. In games between levels, each level beat the one below it about two games in three. Now and then Expert knocks out all seven in one turn.

Tips to win

• Break the X down the middle. Knuckle down where you can see a gap between two legs of the X. A firm, square hit through the gap on the centre marble sends it out between the other two legs, and your shooter usually stops inside the ring for another shot. From the line, the wobble spoils this a little under half the time.
• Not too hard. The shooter is heavier than the marbles, so after a hit it rolls on. Hit just hard enough to send the marble out, and your shooter is more likely to stop in the ring for another shot.
• Think about your next shot. The best place for your shooter to stop is close to marbles that have a short way to go to the line.
• Use the whole line. You can knuckle down anywhere round the ring. For a marble near the line, slide round until a slanting shot would send it over the line after a short roll; a straight shot from right beside it only pushes it back towards the middle.
• Watch what you leave. When your turn ends, your rival can start from any spot on the line. Marbles you leave near the line are easy points for them.
• Cut shots go sideways. Hit a marble off-centre and it goes off at an angle while your shooter swerves the other way. A full hit is surer.

About Ringer and the National Marbles Tournament

Children have played games with marbles for centuries, and every playground seems to have its own rules. Ringer is the game chosen for the first nationwide finals of the US National Marbles Tournament, held in Atlantic City in 1923, so that children from different towns could play each other by the same rules (the tournament itself dates from 1922). The tournament is for players aged 7 to 14, with separate championships for boys and girls, and since 1960 it has been held nearly every June on the beach at Wildwood, New Jersey.

The rules have changed over the years. Since 1931, a player keeps shooting only if their shooter stays in the ring, which made "sticking" the shooter in the ring far more important. Until 1933, a shooter left in the ring after a miss had to stay where it was, and the other player could win the game by knocking it out. Today every turn starts again from outside the ring, as it does here.

Tournament players shoot by "knuckling down": at least one knuckle of the shooting hand touches the ground outside the ring, and the shooter is usually flicked out with the thumb. Hunching (pushing the hand forward as you shoot) costs the shot.

Questions

Updated 12 November 2026