Ninja Fruit

What is Ninja Fruit?

Fruits launch from the bottom of the screen in arcing tosses; swipe a hand fast through them to slice. Slow waves don't count, only deliberate fast swipes. Each sliced fruit splits in two with a juice splash and a score popup. Chain slices for a combo multiplier. Watch out for bombs: slicing one costs points and breaks your combo. Miss three fruits and the round ends. HARD mode spawns fruits faster and adds more bombs.

The badge in Ninja Fruit

There is one badge here, kept on your own device and shown on the 🏆 Achievements panel on the home page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no account to make.

• Slice & Dice — Score 200 in Ninja Fruit.

How to play Ninja Fruit

1. Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks. Choose Normal or Hard first — each keeps its own best score.
2. Sit or stand about an arm's length from the screen: one hand needs to fill a decent patch of the picture, or it will pass straight through a fruit without cutting it. The picture is mirrored, so your hand appears where a mirror would put it.
3. After the three-second countdown, swipe. It has to be a definite fast sweep through the fruit; a slow reach across one does nothing. A white and blue streak follows your swiping hand, so you can see the line you cut.
4. Let the bombs fall. A bomb that drops off the bottom edge costs nothing at all. Only fruit you miss costs a life, and the three hearts in the top corner are counting those down: three on the floor and the round is over.
5. At the end, SPACE throws a fresh round and H goes back to the picker. M silences the music at any point; F goes fullscreen.

If the fruit are arcing over a black screen instead of a picture of your room, the camera never started — camera help checks that in one click, and a closed laptop lens cover looks exactly the same.

What actually decides your score

Swinging hard at everything gets a modest number. Four rules move it.

• The chain, not the swing. A fruit is worth 10, but cut one within a third of a second of the last one and the multiplier steps up, to a ceiling of eight. The eighth fruit of an unbroken run scores 80 instead of 10. A third of a second is far too short to cut one fruit and then go hunting for the next, so chains come from taking two or three fruit that are already close together in one sweep.
• Golden fruit is worth five ordinary ones. Roughly one throw in twenty comes up gold, sparkles turning around it, and is worth 50 before the multiplier. At the end of a chain one can be worth several hundred on its own.
• A bomb is a fine, not a death. Cutting one takes 30 points off, never below zero, and resets your chain. It costs no lives and it does not end the round. When a bomb sits among three fruit, weigh it honestly: the bomb costs 30 points, the fruit you give up costs one heart of three — and only the dropped fruit moves you closer to the end of the round.
• Only fruit that lands stops the game. Bombs can fall past all afternoon for free, which makes leaving one alone a real tactic rather than a cop-out.

Two hundred points in either mode unlocks the site's Slice & Dice badge — twenty fruit with no chaining at all, or far fewer once you can link two.

Read the arc, not the fruit

Everything is thrown from below the bottom edge: it climbs, slows, turns over and falls, roughly two seconds from throw to landing. Where your hand is during those two seconds is most of the game.

• The arcs lean inwards. A fruit launched near the left edge is thrown up and to the right, and one from the right comes back left, so nearly everything crosses the middle of the picture. A hand held mid-screen and swept side to side meets more fruit than one chasing the edges.
• The top of the arc is the slow part. Right at the turn a fruit is barely moving and hangs for a moment. That is the easiest place to cut one cleanly, and the only place two will sit close enough for one sweep to take both.
• A late cut still counts. A fruit is lost only once it has gone past the bottom edge, so a swipe at the last moment low in the picture still saves the heart. Falling fruit are quick by then: a snatch, not a stroke.
• Watch for pairs. About one throw in five is a double, the second fruit following the first by a fifth of a second. Two fruit a fifth of a second apart is the cheapest chain in the game, and spotting the second as it appears is worth more practice than swinging harder.

What Hard actually changes

Two numbers move, and a third deliberately does not.

• About half as much fruit again. Normal opens with roughly a second and a half between throws and works down to a little over half a second across the first fifty seconds. Hard opens at one second and settles near a third of a second. Both speed up; the difference is where each starts and stops.
• Bombs close to twice as common. Fully wound up, about one throw in twelve is a bomb in Normal, closer to one in seven in Hard.
• Still three lives. Nothing about misses changes, which is what makes Hard harder rather than merely busier: with more in the air, the third miss arrives sooner.

Both modes open with no bombs at all — nothing explosive is thrown for the first five seconds or so after the countdown. That opening is the cheapest place in the round to build a long chain.

If you are the one supervising

A turn has no fixed length. There is no clock: the round ends on the third missed fruit, so a turn lasts as long as the player keeps three off the floor. If you need turns of a known length, Whack-a-Mole runs a flat sixty seconds.

Space. One hand in the picture is enough and it plays sitting at a desk; nobody has to stand up or move furniture.

Noise. Chiptune music underneath, a swish on every cut, a low thud when a bomb goes. M silences the music and an indicator in the top right says which state it is in; the cutting sounds stay.

Age. Listed from five, which is as old as anything here starts, and the bombs are the reason: a younger child will swipe happily at everything on screen, which means cutting every bomb too. Costly in points, but it ends nothing, so the game stays playable.

A second pair of hands. Each fruit is judged on its own patch of the picture, so two children side by side both genuinely cut. That is good fun, and it is also how a promising run usually dies: somebody else's arm crossing a bomb spends your thirty.

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