Tanks

Bank your shots off the walls

Tanks looks like a straight duel but plays like a game of angles. Your shells ricochet once off a wall before they fizzle out, which means the enemy is rarely safe just because a block sits between you. Line up a shot so it caroms off a side wall and comes back into the space where the enemy tank is sitting, and you can hit it around the very cover it thinks is protecting it. Learning to picture that one bounce (where the shell travels after it kisses the wall) is the whole skill of the game, and it turns a board full of obstacles into a geometry puzzle you can solve faster than the computer can. Cover only counts if the angles behind it are covered too, so think of every block as casting two shadows: one from the enemy's gun, and one from each wall that gun can use.

Aim at the ghost tank

There is a trick for lining up bank shots without guesswork, and pool players already know it. To bounce a shell off a wall into the enemy, imagine the whole arena flipped over that wall, like a reflection in a mirror. The enemy has a ghost twin standing in that mirrored room. Aim straight at the ghost and fire: your shell travels to the wall, bounces at the matching angle, and arrives where the real tank sits. In practice you do not need to picture the entire flipped arena, just the ghost. If the enemy sits about two tank-widths from the right wall, its ghost sits two tank-widths beyond that wall. Fire at the empty spot and the geometry does the rest. It takes a few rounds to trust, then it becomes the way you see the whole arena. One warning: the shell only survives a single bounce, so double-bank trick shots are off the table. If the line needs two ricochets, reposition instead of forcing it.

Keep moving, and mind your own shell

You drive with the arrow keys or WASD and fire with the action key, and driving is half the fight. A single hit destroys a tank, yours included, so never sit still in the open. The computer leads its shots, meaning it fires at where you are going, so drifting in a steady line makes you easy to pick off while small, unpredictable moves throw its aim off. And because your own shell bounces, it can come back and kill you: do not fire down a short corridor you are about to drive into, and give a banked shot room to travel before you follow it in. Corners deserve extra respect. Two walls mean shells return at strange angles, and a corner is the easiest place to be trapped by your own ricochet. Walls work on defence too: hover near cover, step behind it as the enemy fires, and you have cost it a shell and bought yourself a free window to answer. The winning rhythm is to shelter behind a block, wait for an angle the enemy is not covering, then dart out and take it. And spend the opening second of each round moving, not shooting. A shell fired blind at the start tends to bounce back through the middle of the arena right when you want to cross it, and the computer is happy to let your own opening mistake do its work for it.

The tank duel that shipped with a console

Two tanks trading bank shots around a maze of blocks goes right back to Combat, the 1977 cartridge packed in with the Atari 2600 that millions of players found waiting in the box on day one. Its bouncing-shell tank battles were, for a lot of people, the first video game they ever touched. The idea is even older than that console. In 1974 an arcade game called Tank, designed by Steve Bristow, put two players in a walled maze, and it was the hit that kept Kee Games alive, a company secretly owned by Atari and run as a fake rival so Atari could sell machines to more distributors. Combat grew straight out of Tank and crammed 27 game variations into one cartridge. The formula stuck around because it is so clean: one hit, one life per round, and walls that turn every shell into a bank shot. Whoever wins the target number of rounds first takes the match.