Catch Tips: Stars, Bombs and the Speed Curve

Updated October 2026

Catch is a falling-object game with an unusual balance of risk. Stars are worth a point each, bombs end the run on contact, and every star that reaches the ground takes away one of only three lives. Because the game punishes both greed and caution, strong players are not the ones with the quickest reactions but the ones who choose correctly which item to give up. This guide explains how the basket is controlled, how fast the game becomes, why the screen feels most crowded at around half a minute, and how to train the decisions that decide long runs.

The rules that end a run

Nothing falls until you press Start, so you can settle in before the first item appears. Each falling item is a star or a bomb, with bombs making up about 32 percent of the total. Items appear at a random horizontal position anywhere across the play area.

• A star that touches the basket adds one point.
• A star that falls past the bottom of the screen costs one of your three lives. The third missed star ends the game, so you can afford two misses in an entire run.
• A bomb that touches the basket ends the game at once, regardless of lives.
• A bomb that falls past is harmless and costs nothing.

Contact is generous in both directions. The basket is 80 pixels wide and 20 tall, and each item counts as a circle with a 14-pixel radius, so an item touches the basket if any part of it overlaps any part of the basket, including the sides. In effect, the catching zone for an item's centre is about 108 pixels wide, roughly a third of the width of a typical phone screen. The same generosity applies to bombs, which is why clipping one with the corner of the basket is the most common way to lose.

How the basket really moves

The basket does not slide toward your finger. The moment you touch the play area, it jumps so that its centre sits directly under your finger, and while you keep the finger down it follows your horizontal position exactly. You can touch anywhere on the field, not just on the basket. On a keyboard, the left and right arrow keys move it 30 pixels per press.

This has an important consequence for bombs. The game checks for contact on every frame at wherever the basket is at that moment. A quick, decisive movement past a bomb's column spends very little time underneath it, while a slow drag across the same column keeps the basket exposed for many frames. When you have to cross the path of a falling bomb, cross it early and quickly, or lift your finger and touch down again on the far side, which teleports the basket in a single step.

How the difficulty grows

Two things change as time passes, and both depend only on how long you have survived, not on your score.

The fall speed starts at 220 pixels per second and grows steadily with no upper limit: it doubles after 28 seconds, triples after 56 seconds and keeps climbing. Every item on screen speeds up together, including ones already partway down.

The gap between new items starts at 0.8 seconds and shrinks by about 17 milliseconds every second until it reaches its minimum of 0.26 seconds, just over 32 seconds into a run. After that items arrive at a constant rate of almost four per second, but they keep falling faster.

On a typical phone held upright, the play area is around 660 pixels tall. In our calculations for that size, an item takes about 2.8 seconds to reach the basket at the start, about 1.4 seconds at 28 seconds, about 0.9 seconds at the one-minute mark, and under 0.7 seconds by a minute and a half. Combine the two curves and you get the most interesting fact about the game: the number of items on screen at once rises from about three and a half to a peak of about five at roughly 32 seconds, then slowly falls again. The middle of a run is the most crowded; the late game is sparser but much faster.

What a good score looks like

Since the spawn schedule is fixed, you can estimate how many stars have fallen by any moment. In our simulation at 60 frames per second, about 15 stars had fallen after 15 seconds, about 39 after 30 seconds, about 116 after a minute and about 192 after a minute and a half. After the half-minute mark, stars keep arriving at roughly two and a half per second.

Because you can only miss two stars, your score is very close to the number of stars that fell before your run ended. A score of 40 means you survived the crowded phase; 100 means you handled a full minute of growing speed; 200 means you were still reading the field when items crossed the screen in two-thirds of a second.

Decisions that keep you alive

Most deaths in the middle of a run come from a single situation: a star and a bomb falling close together. The rule is simple and worth memorising. A bomb always ends the run; a star costs one life out of three. When you cannot safely take the star without risking contact with the bomb, let the star go. Spending a life to avoid a bomb is the correct trade every time.

• Watch the top, not the basket. Your hand follows your eyes. Look at where items are appearing and let the basket's position take care of itself, glancing down only for items about to land.
• Sort the field by arrival time. Items all fall at the same speed, so the lowest item always arrives first. Deal with the lowest star, then plan for the next one, rather than chasing whichever looks closest to the basket sideways.
• Leave room on both sides. Parking the basket against a wall means any bomb that lands near you can only be avoided in one direction. A position nearer the middle gives you two escape routes.
• Count your lives. With three lives you can sacrifice a difficult star freely. With one left, every star must be caught, so start positioning for stars earlier and accept slightly more risk near bombs only when there is truly no other way.

Common mistakes

The classic error is the late, slow correction: seeing a star at the last moment and dragging the basket under it, straight through a bomb that was falling alongside. Remember that the basket jumps to your finger, so a clean tap at the target position beats a hurried slide. A second mistake is overcommitting to stars near the walls; the catch zone extends 14 pixels past each side of the basket, so you do not need to centre every star perfectly. A third is relaxing after the crowded middle phase. When the screen thins out again after the 45-second mark, items are falling faster than ever and reactions have to be quicker.

A practice plan

1. Play several runs whose only goal is never to touch a bomb. Ignore your score and let difficult stars go freely.
2. Next, practise the jump: instead of dragging, lift and touch at each target. Notice how much less often you clip bombs.
3. Aim to pass 40, which means surviving the most crowded part of the game with at least one life left.
4. Then focus on speed of reading. Past one minute, the challenge is spotting each new item as it appears so your hand is already moving before it is halfway down.

Your best score is stored on your device, and any score above zero can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.