How to play carrom on this board
You play the white men and shoot from the base line nearest you. Your men are ringed in gold so you never have to remember which colour you were given. The bot plays black from the far line, and the single red disc in the middle is the queen.
A stroke has two parts. First place the striker: drag it left or right along the double line at your end. It has to sit across both lines and it may not touch either of the red circles at the ends, so the legal stretch is marked for you and the striker will not go outside it. Then aim: press anywhere else on the board and drag away from the direction you want the striker to travel, like pulling a slingshot. A white ray shows the path and a meter shows the power. Let go and it flicks.
If you would rather not drag, the arrow keys do the same job — left and right slide the striker, up and down set the power, A and D swing the aim, and space shoots.
Pocket one of your own men and you shoot again. That is the engine of the game: a good player strings strokes together and the other side sits and watches. Pocket nothing, and the turn passes.
Playing carrom with friends, or with a stranger
A friend room takes one click and no account. Press Create a friend room and you get a four-letter code. Send it, they press Join with a code, and the board opens. The link in the rail does the same job in one tap — anyone opening it lands straight in your room. Nobody types an email, nobody makes an account, and there is no daily limit on how many boards you play.
Or press Match me with anyone and you are put into the first room that is waiting for a player. If nobody is waiting, your own room stays open and takes the next person who asks. There is no separate queue and no lobby server: every page on this site already publishes "I am waiting in room ABCD" to one shared presence channel, so matchmaking is just reading it.
Closing the tab does not end the game. A live board here is nothing but the seat order and the ordered list of strokes, so it fits in your browser's own storage. Refresh, or reopen the room link an hour later, and the board is rebuilt stroke by stroke and you are back in your seat facing the same position. If the person who created the room disappears, the other seat takes over running it; and if your opponent drops mid-board, the house bot takes their strokes so you are never left staring at a board that cannot move. A board the bot had to finish is not rated — they did not play it, so it does not count for or against either of you.
What travels between the two boards is the stroke, not the board. When you flick, what goes across is where you put the striker, which way you pointed it and how hard you hit it — four numbers. Both screens then run the same physics on the same position and land on the same result, because the engine has no random numbers and no clock in it anywhere. That is roughly forty times less data than sending nineteen disc positions, and more importantly it means neither computer is the referee: your opponent cannot send you a board, only a shot. Every stroke also carries a fingerprint of the board it was played from, and if the two ever fail to match, the page says so on screen and resynchronises rather than letting two people quietly play different games.
Why cheating is a smaller problem here, and where that stops being true
The most common complaint about online carrom is not the physics or the rules. It is aim-bots and auto-play hacks — opponents who pot every coin — and in the higher-stake rooms players report running into them constantly. Underneath that sits a doubt that no feature fixes: players are not sure the opponent is a real person at all.
Nearly all of that is downstream of money. The big carrom apps are real-money titles: coins gate the good rooms, buying coins skips the grind, and a bot that pots every coin is therefore worth writing. We have no coins, no wagers, no purchase and no cash ladder, so the same tool has nothing to win. That is the one thing the leaders cannot copy without giving up their revenue, and it is why this page is free rather than free-to-start.
On top of that, no engine help is given against a person. The forward ray and the cut line that help you against the bot are refused in the game's own logic when the opponent is human — not hidden with a stylesheet, not toggled off in a menu. Nothing is calculated, so there is nothing on the page to switch back on. Both sides get the same board and the same nothing.
And here is the honest limit. We cannot promise nobody ever cheats. A person determined enough could read the board off the screen and compute a shot outside the page, and we would not know. So the only consequence a fair-play flag ever has here is that the game does not count: no bans, no accusations, no points taken off anyone by name. Two reasons, and both are constraints rather than preferences. Identity on this site is a browser id, so a ban lasts exactly until someone clears their site data. And enforcement of that kind reliably catches the clumsy and never the careful, which is worse than not enforcing. Declining to score is the strongest honest move available.
The full rules, including the ones that decide games
Nineteen men are packed into the centre circle — nine white, nine black, and the red queen at the middle. The first stroke of the board is the break, and it has to disturb the cluster; a break that touches nothing is a foul.
The queen. She is worth three points and she is the reason people lose games they thought they had won. Pocketing her is only half of it — she must be covered. On the same stroke that sinks her, or on the very next stroke, you must also pocket one of your own men. Fail, and she is placed back in the centre circle and is anyone's again. On top of that, she may not be taken at all until you have already pocketed at least one of your own men; trying earlier is not a foul and costs you nothing, but she goes back. Because this is the rule that ambushes beginners, the panel beside the board names the queen's state on every single stroke rather than letting you discover it from a disc that mysteriously reappeared.
Fouls. Three things foul a stroke: pocketing the striker, pocketing one of your opponent's men, and failing to disturb the cluster on the break. A foul ends your turn, returns every man you pocketed on that stroke, and sends one further man of yours from the pocket back to the centre as a penalty. If you have not pocketed any men yet there is nothing to return, so the penalty is carried as a due and paid out of the next man you do pocket — the clause everybody forgets, which is why there is a counter for it in the rail.
Winning the board. You win by pocketing all nine of your own men, but you may not finish while the queen is unresolved. Clear your last man with the queen neither covered nor sitting on the board and the stroke is undone and penalised. The winner scores one point for every opponent man still on the board, plus three for the queen if they covered her — and the queen only counts while the winner's running match total is under 22, which is the scoring detail that gets skipped most often. A full match is first to 25 points or eight boards. This page plays a single board and reports its score.
Carrom is a house-rule game and the codes genuinely disagree in places. Where they do, this board follows the common club reading and says so: pocketing an opponent's man is treated as a foul here, while strict ICF merely ends your turn and lets the man count for them.
Strategy, in the order it actually matters
Break sideways, not straight. A full-power shot into the nose of the cluster sprays men everywhere including toward your opponent's pockets. A softer angled break opens a few men on your side and leaves the rest packed.
The cut angle is the whole skill. To send a man into a pocket, the striker must arrive at the point directly opposite the pocket from that man — the ghost position. Aim at where the striker has to be at the moment of contact, not at the man itself. Hitting a man dead centre sends it straight along the line you hit it, which is almost never where a pocket is.
Chain strokes. Because pocketing your own man buys another stroke, the value of a shot is not the man it sinks, it is the position it leaves. Sinking a man and leaving the next one hanging in front of the same pocket is worth two men. Sinking a man and scattering the rest is worth one.
Do not chase the queen early. She is worth three points and nothing at all if you cannot cover her. Take a man first, then take her, then take another man on the same stroke if you can — that is the sequence that actually banks the three points.
Watch the due counter. A foul before you have pocketed anything does not feel expensive, because nothing visibly leaves the board. It still costs a man; it just takes it later, out of your next success.
What the physics here does and does not do
The board runs a rigid-disc simulation and it is worth being exact about which half of it is real. Collisions are exact. Momentum and kinetic energy are conserved, two equal discs meeting off-centre separate at exactly ninety degrees, a head-on hit between equal masses stops the mover dead, and a cushion reflects at the angle of incidence. Those are closed-form answers that the test suite checks against the integrator to twelve decimal places rather than to "looks about right", and the striker-to-man mass ratio — 15 g against 5.5 g — is the real one.
And here is what is missing. There is no spin and no English of any kind; discs carry an angular velocity but nothing reads it back into the motion, so a real player's side and back spin do not exist here. There is no friction at the moment of impact, so a glancing blow imparts no rub and no rotation. Restitution is fixed at exactly 1, meaning every contact is perfectly elastic — real carrom men are nearer 0.8 and a wooden frame is lossier still. Every bit of energy loss in the model therefore lives in one sliding-friction term, and that coefficient was tuned so a board settles in a plausible time. It is not a measured surface value and should not be read as one. There is no cushion friction, no board tilt, no powder, and no third dimension: a disc is pocketed the instant its centre crosses into a pocket circle.
The board dimensions are nominal International Carrom Federation values converted to metres, and the suite checks them for internal consistency — that the pockets are tangent to both cushions, that the queen's circle fits inside the centre circle, that the base line clears the base circles — rather than asserting a published table we cannot verify from here.
So: trust the geometry of a shot, and do not expect the feel of a real board. We would rather write that down than let you assume it.
How strong is the bot?
Easy lines the striker up on whichever of its men is nearest its own base line and hits it head on at a fixed power. It runs no simulation at all, so it does not know where the man will end up and it mostly finds out the hard way.
Medium computes, for each of its men, the ghost position that would send that man into its nearest pocket, and actually simulates that stroke — up to about thirty candidate shots a turn — then plays whichever one pockets the most and fouls the least.
Hard does the same for every pocket rather than the nearest, at three power settings, with a spread of angles either side of the perfect line — up to about a hundred and fifty simulated strokes — and it also scores the position it leaves behind, so it will take a slightly worse pocket to keep the next one on. It is a decent club opponent and it is not a carrom champion.
Those are ceilings, not averages, and they fall as the game goes on: a candidate is thrown away when the ghost position sits behind the base line, so a bot with three men left may only have nine legal shots to look at. The number it actually simulated is printed beside every one of its strokes in the shot log, so the claim is checkable rather than a boast.
Questions people ask
Can I play carrom online with friends?
Yes, and it needs no account from either of you. Press Create a friend room and you get a four-letter code; send them the code or the room link and they are on your board. There is also Match me with anyone, which pairs you with whoever is waiting, and three bot levels if nobody is around. Everything is free and there is no limit on how many games you play.
What happens if I close the tab or my opponent disconnects?
The game survives it. A live board here is stored as the seat order plus the list of strokes, so reopening the room link rebuilds the position and puts you back in your own seat. If the person who opened the room vanishes, the other seat takes over running it. If your opponent drops mid-board, the house bot plays their strokes so you are not stuck waiting — and a board the bot had to finish is not rated, because they did not play it.
Are there hackers or aim-bots in carrom here?
There is nothing for one to win. The aim-bot and auto-play problem players describe in online carrom lives in the real-money apps, where coins gate the rooms and a bot that pots every coin pays for itself. This page has no coins, no wagers and nothing to buy. On top of that the aim line and cut line are refused in the game's logic when your opponent is a person, so neither of you has them. What we will not claim is that cheating is impossible: if our fair-play check flags a game, the only consequence is that the game does not count — no bans and no accusations, because identity here is a browser id and a ban would last until someone cleared their data.
What is the queen in carrom, and what does covering her mean?
The queen is the single red disc that starts in the middle of the board. She is worth three points, but only to the player who covers her. Covering means that on the same stroke that pockets her, or on the very next stroke, you also pocket one of your own men. If you do not, the queen is placed back in the centre circle and is anyone's again. This board says so in words the moment it happens rather than leaving you to find out.
What happens if I pocket the striker in carrom?
It is a foul. Your turn ends, any men you pocketed on that stroke go back to the centre, and one more of your already-pocketed men is returned as the penalty. If you have not pocketed any men yet, the penalty is carried as a due and paid out of the next man you do pocket. That carried due is the part of the rule almost everyone forgets, so this board tracks it and shows it beside the score.
Can I pocket the queen on my first shot?
No. Under the International Carrom Federation rules used here, the queen may only be taken after you have already pocketed at least one of your own men. Taking her earlier is not a foul and costs you no penalty — she is simply put back in the centre circle and play carries on.
How do you win a game of carrom?
You win the board by pocketing all nine of your own men, but you may not finish while the queen is still unresolved. If you clear your last man with the queen neither covered nor back on the board, the stroke is undone and penalised. The winner then scores one point for every opponent man still on the board, plus three for the queen if they covered her and their running match total is under 22. A full match is first to 25 points or eight boards; this page plays a single board.
How do I aim and shoot?
Drag the striker left or right along your base line to place it, then press anywhere else on the board and drag away from the direction you want to shoot — like a slingshot. The white line shows where the striker will go and the meter shows how hard. Let go to flick. Arrow keys work too: left and right move the striker, up and down set the power, A and D swing the aim, and space shoots.
Is the physics on this board realistic?
Partly, and we would rather be specific than say yes. Collisions are exact rigid-disc collisions — momentum and kinetic energy are conserved, equal masses striking off-centre separate at exactly ninety degrees, and a cushion reflects at the angle of incidence. What is missing is real: there is no spin or English of any kind, no friction at the moment of impact, and restitution is fixed at 1, meaning every contact is perfectly elastic. All the energy loss in the model lives in one sliding-friction term whose value was tuned so that a board settles in a plausible time, not measured off a real board. So the geometry of a shot is trustworthy and the feel of a real carrom board is not fully reproduced.
Do I need an account to play carrom here?
No. There is no signup, no email, no download, no daily limit and no ads between you and the board. Every bot level is free. Nothing on this page is held back for a paid tier because there is no paid tier.