Penalty Tips: Aiming, Power and Beating the Keeper

Updated October 2026

Penalty gives you three lives, one ball and a goalkeeper who never stops shuffling across the goal mouth. Every goal makes the target a little narrower, and every save, wide shot or ball off the screen costs a life. Because the keeper slides at a steady speed during each kick, this is less a guessing game than a timing puzzle: where will the keeper be when the ball arrives, and where will the ball actually cross the line? This guide explains how the game reads your drag, how shots are judged, and how to time them.

How a shot is judged

Nothing is decided until the ball reaches the goal line at the top of the field. At that instant the game asks two questions. First, is the whole ball between the posts? The centre of the ball must be at least one ball radius inside each post, so a shot that clips the post counts as wide. Second, is the ball touching the keeper? The keeper is treated as a box 44 pixels wide, the ball has a 14-pixel radius, and the save check effectively comes down to horizontal distance: if the centre of the ball is within 36 pixels of the centre of the keeper, it is saved. Anything else is a goal.

That means the keeper covers a window 72 pixels wide wherever it happens to be standing. Your job is to put the ball through the goal mouth anywhere outside that window, at the moment the ball arrives.

How your drag becomes a kick

You can start the gesture on the ball, within a generous circle around it, or anywhere in the lower half of the field. What matters is where you lift your finger. The kick travels from the ball toward your release point, and its power depends on how far that release point is from the ball, not on how far your finger moved. A release at least 140 pixels from the ball gives full power; anything under 16 pixels, or a release level with or below the ball, is ignored and you can simply try again.

The white arrow drawn while you drag uses the same direction calculation, so it is honest about the direction. It is a straight line, though, and the real ball does not fly in a straight line, which is the next point.

Why full power is almost always right

Shot speed ranges from 480 pixels per second at minimum power to 1,100 at maximum, and a gentle pull back toward the kicker slows the ball's forward travel as it goes. Sideways speed is not slowed, so a slower ball spends longer drifting sideways for every pixel it gains toward the goal. Angled shots therefore land wider than the arrow suggests, and the weaker the kick, the bigger the gap.

We simulated this on the field size of a 390×844 phone, where the ball starts about 516 pixels below the goal line. Aimed 15 degrees off centre, a full-power shot crossed the line about 7 pixels wider than the arrow's line, a half-power shot about 15 pixels wider, and a near-minimum shot more than 40 pixels wider. Flight time also changes a lot: about 0.49 seconds at full power, 0.72 seconds at half power and over 1.1 seconds for the weakest kick. The keeper moves the whole time.

So full power gives you two advantages at once: the arrow tells the truth, and the keeper has the least time to move into the ball's path. Get into the habit of pulling well past the 140-pixel mark so that every shot is a full-power shot, and aim purely with direction.

Reading the keeper

The keeper glides at a constant speed and turns around the moment it reaches a post. On a 390×844 phone that speed is 180 pixels per second at kick-off and grows by 18 pixels per second with every goal, with no ceiling. Each kick the keeper starts from a random spot heading in a random direction, so take a beat to see which way it is going; once it is moving, its path until you shoot is completely regular and can be predicted. From the ninth goal on it also reads your shot, covered below.

At the start of a run, at full power on our test phone, the keeper travels about 90 pixels while the ball is in the air, and more after every goal. Use that as your lead:

• Shoot behind it. The safest target is the side the keeper is moving away from. Aim just inside the post it has recently left, and the gap only grows during the flight.
• Release as it turns. When the keeper bounces off one post and heads back, the far half of the goal is empty for the longest time. A shot to that side, released right at the turn, has the most room.
• Avoid the middle. The keeper crosses the centre of the goal twice per lap, so a central shot is the one most likely to meet it.

Timing is the same on every screen. Ball speed is scaled to the distance from the spot to the goal line and keeper speed to the width of the field, so a full-power shot takes about half a second and the keeper covers the same share of the goal during it on a small phone as on a tall one.

The narrowing goal

The goal begins 80 percent as wide as the field. After every goal, each post moves 4 pixels toward the centre, until the goal is 36 percent of the field width. On the test phone that is 285 pixels at the start and 128 pixels at the narrowest, which is reached after 20 goals.

At that width, the area where the ball's centre can legally cross is about 100 pixels across, and the keeper's 72-pixel window takes most of it. By then the keeper slides about three times as fast as at kick-off. The only open space is beside whichever post the keeper is furthest from, roughly 50 pixels at best. Late in a run, every shot should be a full-power shot into that corner, released just as the keeper begins to move away from it.

From the ninth goal the keeper also reads your shot: the moment you kick, it starts stretching toward the point where the ball will cross, and the distance it can stretch during the flight grows with every goal, without limit. A slow shot gives it the most time, which is one more reason to kick at full power. Sooner or later its reach covers the whole goal, so every run ends; on our test phone, scoring stops being possible somewhere in the low twenties.

Managing three lives

Saves, wide shots and balls that leave the side of the screen all cost the same single life, and after each shot there is a short pause before the ball resets. Use that pause to look at the keeper rather than the ball. Some practical rules:

• Never shoot while the keeper is in the middle of the goal heading toward your target side; wait one turn.
• Do not aim tighter than you need early on. With a wide goal there is plenty of room inside the posts, so leave a safety margin.
• If you lose a life to a wide shot, your release angle was too extreme; if you lose one to a save, you released too early or aimed too close to the keeper's path.

A practice routine

1. Take ten full-power shots aimed at the post the keeper has just left, and note how much lead you need on your phone.
2. Practise releasing exactly as the keeper turns around at a post.
3. Once you reach the narrow goal regularly, shoot only into the far corner at the turn, and accept that the keeper's growing reach will end the run before long.

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