How to play
Move your mouse or finger to control the basket.
About Catch the Fruit
Catch the Fruit is a simple game with a basket at the bottom of the screen and fruit falling out of a clear blue sky. Slide the basket underneath each piece before it hits the ground. Catch as many as you can. Drop three and the game is over.
How to play
Move your mouse left and right, or drag your finger along the screen, and the brown basket follows it. There are no buttons. The basket goes exactly where your pointer or finger is, as fast as you can move it.
Fruit appears at the top at random positions and falls straight down. If it lands in the basket you score a point. If it reaches the ground, you lose a life. You start with three, shown beside your score. When the last one goes, tap to begin again.
Five kinds of fruit come down: apples, bananas, grapes, cherries and watermelon. They are all worth one point each, and there is nothing in the mix that you need to avoid. If it falls, catch it.
How the difficulty builds
A new fruit is dropped about every two thirds of a second, and that rate stays the same all game. What changes is the speed of the fall. Each piece falls at its own pace, some dawdling and some dropping quickly, and the whole range creeps upwards as the game goes on.
At the start you can catch one fruit, stroll across and wait for the next. A minute in, the fruit is falling roughly twice as fast, and you have to start moving before the previous piece has even landed. Later still, two fruits released one after the other on opposite sides can be a real stretch.
Catching more
Look up. The top half of the screen tells you what is coming. If you only watch the basket, you are reacting to fruit that is nearly on the ground.
Catch in order of arrival, not order of appearance. Because fruits fall at different speeds, a later one can overtake an earlier one. Before you move, check which piece will reach the bottom first and go there. This single habit saves more lives than anything else.
Come back to the centre. After each catch, if nothing is urgent, drift towards the middle. From there the furthest you will ever have to travel is half the screen.
You do not need to be dead centre. The basket is fairly wide, and a fruit that clips the edge still counts. When time is short, getting the nearest edge of the basket under the fruit is enough, and it leaves you closer to the next one.
Sometimes a fruit cannot be saved. If two are landing at almost the same moment at opposite sides, take the sure one. Lunging for both often means catching neither.
On a phone, keep your finger low on the screen, under the basket, so your hand does not hide the falling fruit.
Scores
Forty catches is a fair first effort. Eighty means you handled the faster stretch. Past a hundred and twenty, you are reading the sky well.
A friendly game for all ages
The idea is obvious the moment you see it, which makes Catch the Fruit a good choice for young children, and the slow start gives them time to get the hang of it. Older players will find the later stages a genuine test of anticipation.
It is free and runs in your browser on phones, tablets and computers, with nothing to download.