Chalk Tips: Drawing Ramps That Land in the Ring

Updated October 2026

Chalk looks like a sketching toy, but underneath it is a small physics puzzle with very consistent rules. Every line you draw becomes a solid rail, the ball obeys the same gravity and friction on every phone, and every level is checked by the game before you see it. Once you know how the ball behaves on a drawn line, most levels stop being trial and error and become a short calculation: where should the line start, how steep should it be, and where exactly should it end. This guide walks through those rules and turns them into a routine you can repeat on every board.

What the game guarantees about every level

The playing field is a fixed area 360 units wide and 560 tall, scaled to fit your screen; on a typical phone one unit is roughly one pixel. The yellow ball always starts 70 units below the top edge, somewhere between 60 and 300 units across. The green ring sits between 58 and 86 percent of the way down the board, on a randomly chosen side of the ball and usually well off to that side, although a ring near the edge of the board can end up closer to the ball's column.

The most useful fact is how levels are approved. Before a board is shown, the generator tries a set of simple answers: one straight stroke, or a stroke with a single bend, starting a little over 40 units under the ball and finishing just above the ring. It runs the real physics on each one, rejects any that pass through a grey block or use more chalk than the level allows, and only releases the board if one of them lands. So every level you are given can be solved with at most two straight pieces of chalk, beginning just beneath the ball. You never need an elaborate maze of lines.

How a drawn line really behaves

Your chalk is a rail about ten units thick and the ball has a radius of eleven, so contact happens a little earlier than the drawn edge suggests. The ball bounces very little off chalk; most of its downward speed is absorbed on impact, which is why a ball dropped onto a ramp settles and starts to roll instead of bouncing away.

Rolling is where Chalk differs from real life. Every physics step the ball spends pressed against a line strips a tenth of its speed along that line, so the ball cannot keep accelerating down a long ramp. It quickly reaches a steady crawl and stays there. In our simulation, a straight ramp at 15 degrees settled at about 30 units per second, 30 degrees at roughly 55, 45 degrees at about 75 to 90, and 60 degrees at around 100 to 115. A long ramp is therefore not a launcher. It is a slow conveyor belt.

Two consequences follow. First, very shallow lines are dangerous. If the ball moves slower than 12 units per second for more than 1.6 seconds, the game counts it as stuck and you lose a try. In our simulation a perfectly straight line at 6 degrees or less stopped the ball outright, and hand-drawn lines around 10 degrees kept it rolling but took more than 12 seconds to cover 280 units. Aim for at least 15 to 20 degrees on anything the ball has to travel along. Second, the ball leaves the end of a ramp slowly and drops almost straight down, which makes the end of your line the most important point you draw.

Where to end the line

The ring is not a physical hoop with a rim. It is a target zone: the moment the centre of the ball comes within the ring's radius plus about five and a half units of the ring's centre, the level is cleared. Speed does not matter, and the ball does not need to come to rest inside it. It only has to pass through.

Because the ball crawls off the tip of a ramp and falls nearly vertically, the landing point is easy to predict. In our simulation we ended ramps at 20, 30 and 45 degrees at heights of 30, 80 and 150 units above a ring of radius 16. In every case the ball scored when the ring's centre was between about 10 and 40 units beyond the tip of the line, measured in the direction the ball was rolling, and missed outside that window. Drop height made almost no difference. A simple rule covers it: finish the stroke about one ball-width short of the ring's centre, on the side the ball is coming from, anywhere above the ring.

That also means you rarely need to carry the ball all the way down. Ending high and letting gravity do the rest uses less chalk and avoids the grey blocks near the ring, which the generator always keeps a small clearing around.

Spending chalk wisely

Each level's chalk allowance is tied to the straight-line distance from the ball to the ring. On level 1 you get about 1.85 times that distance; the multiplier falls by 0.045 per level to 1.18 times the distance at level 16, holds there until level 23, and then keeps shrinking slowly, though never below what the generator's own shortest solution needs, so every level can still be cleared. In our simulation the generator's own reference answer used about 46 percent of the available chalk on level 1 but around 73 percent by level 16, and deep into a run the margin over that reference solution gets thinner still, so early boards forgive sloppy strokes while later ones expect you to draw close to the direct route.

A few mechanics help you keep chalk in reserve:

• Draw in one smooth motion. The game records a new point every time your finger moves at least four units. Wobbles add length without adding usefulness.
• A tap is free. A touch that never moves gives its chalk back, so an accidental poke costs nothing.
• Undo is a full refund. Removing the last stroke returns all of its chalk, so you can test a shape and take it back before you press Drop.
• The bar warns you. It turns red under 20 percent. A stroke that runs out simply stops where the chalk ended, and you cannot start a new one with almost nothing left.

Working around the grey blocks

Grey blocks are solid. The ball pushes out of them and loses most of its speed in the direction of the hit, so a block in the flight path usually kills the shot rather than redirecting it neatly. The number of blocks the generator attempts grows with the level, from one at the start to a maximum of six from level 13, though some attempts are discarded for being too close to the ball's starting column or the ring, so you will often see fewer.

The side edges of the board are walls too, and they return a little under half of the ball's sideways speed. They can rescue a ball that drifts too far, but they are not reliable enough to plan around. There is no floor: a ball that falls past the bottom is a miss. When a block sits between the ball and the ring, the cleanest fix is usually a single bend. Run the first piece steeply past the block's end, then turn it toward the ring so the tip finishes in the landing window described above.

Tries, misses and the routine that wins

You have three tries for the whole run, not per level. A miss keeps the same board, but it wipes every line and refills the chalk bar, so you redraw from scratch with the same layout. Clearing a level raises your score by one and a new board appears after a short pause. Your score is simply the number of levels cleared, and your best is stored on your device. The physics runs in fixed steps of 1/120 of a second, so the same drawing produces the same result on a slow phone and a fast one. A failed shot is information, not bad luck.

1. Start the stroke a little under the ball, slightly toward the ring's side, so the ball lands on it at once instead of falling far first.
2. Keep the slope at 20 degrees or steeper wherever the ball must roll.
3. Stop the line about one ball-width before the ring's centre, above it.
4. If a block is in the way, add one bend rather than a second separate stroke.
5. After a miss, look at where the ball actually left your line and move the tip by that error.

The ring shrinks a little each level up to level 23 and then keeps shrinking more slowly for as long as the run lasts, so precision at the tip matters more and more as a run goes on. Practise ending your strokes cleanly on early boards and the later ones become the same exercise with less margin.