A round
Eight-ball
Whoever pots first takes that group and the other player gets the rest — until then the table is open and anything goes. Clear your seven and the eight is yours to have, but you have to say which pocket you are putting it in before you hit it. Putting it anywhere else loses the rack on the spot, and so does potting it early, and so does putting the white down after it.
Miss the group you are on, put the white down, or fail to drive anything to a cushion, and the other player picks the white up and puts it wherever on the cloth they like. That is the whole punishment and it is a heavy one.
Killer, for a table that will not fit round a rack
Eight-ball is two people and nine-ball is four, so a table of five picks killer. Everybody gets three lives and one shot each, round and round: pot a ball and you keep them, miss and you lose one, and at nought you are out and the rotation closes over your chair.
Two to eight play, the table plays down to nothing and goes straight back up, and the last person standing takes it. Thirty seconds a shot rather than seventy-five.
The table is a simulation and the lines are not a guess
Where the object ball goes is exactly where the table says it goes, and the dashed line is what your own white does afterwards — drawn from the same friction and the same restitution the shot is played with. It stops at the first cushion on purpose: past that it would be a promise the table has not made.
The shot itself runs once on the server, seeded from the room's own state. Nothing is decided in your browser: what arrives is where every ball ended up plus a recording of how it got there, thirty positions a second. Same seed, same shot, same result, on any machine, for ever — so you can close the tab mid-shot and the balls still land where they were always going to.
On the sheet
Questions people ask
How do you take a shot?
Drag back from the white and let go. The harder you pull, the harder it goes. There is a solid line showing where the object ball will run and a dashed one showing what your white does afterwards.
Can eight people play pool?
In killer, yes. Three lives each and one shot each in rotation, thirty seconds a shot, last one standing takes it. Eight-ball is for two and nine-ball is for four.
Does anybody have to install anything to play Pool?
No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.
Do we need accounts?
No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.
How many people can play Pool?
1 to 8 — best with two for eight-ball, four for nine-ball, up to eight for killer. A room seats up to 12.
How long does a game of Pool take?
About 15 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.
Does it work over a video call?
That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.