Agar.io — Play Free Online

Agar.io starts you as a tiny coloured dot in a huge, pale, gridded arena crowded with other players. Everything you do comes down to one rule: you can swallow anything smaller than you, and anything bigger can swallow you. Eat the scattered pellets and the smaller blobs, grow, and climb the leaderboard in the corner of the screen.

A session is a loop of nerves and greed. Early on you are safe because nobody bothers with you, but you are also slow to grow. Later you are fast to snowball but a target for everything around you. Rounds can last thirty seconds or half an hour, and when you are eaten you simply respawn and start again, which makes it an easy game to dip into between other things.

If you came to Doodle Jump for quick, score-chasing games, this one scratches the same itch from a different angle: instead of climbing a fixed level, you are chasing a bigger number than the other people on the map.

How to play

You steer with the mouse: your cell drifts toward the pointer, and the further the pointer is from your cell, the faster you go. The two other actions are on the keyboard.

• Mouse – move your cell.
• Space – split into two halves. The front half lunges forward, which is the way to catch something just out of reach.
• W – eject a small piece of mass. It is mostly used to feed a teammate or to shoot at a virus.

On a phone, the same actions are on-screen: drag to steer and use the buttons for split and eject.

Green spiky blobs are viruses. If you are large, touching one bursts you into many pieces. If you are small, you can hide behind one because bigger players avoid them.

Tips

• Stay near the edges while you are small. There are fewer attackers coming from every direction, and you can eat pellets at your own pace.
• Only split when your prey is small enough that one half can swallow it whole. A split that misses leaves you in two vulnerable pieces.
• Bigger means slower. Once you are large, you cannot chase small cells, so let them come to you or use a split to close the gap.
• Your split pieces merge back together after a while, and the wait grows with their size, so do not split near a larger player.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

Most of the catalogue here is more predictable than Agar.io. Helix Jump and Bird Jumper are solo arcade games where only your timing matters, and Bouncy Basketball is a short head-to-head match. Fireboy and Watergirl is the closest in spirit if you like cooperating, though it is puzzle-based. Agar.io is the one where other people decide how your run ends.

It suits anyone who likes short, restartable sessions with a mouse and a few spare minutes, and it runs in the browser with nothing to install.