Pen Fight operated by LetsCrak

How to Play Pen Fight

Last updated: 4 September 2026

To play Pen Fight, drag backwards from your own pen and let go. The pen flicks in the direction you pulled, with power set by how far you pulled. Knock your rival's pen off the edge of the desk and the round is yours. Players take one flick each in turn, and the last pen still on the desk wins.

The rules take about ninety seconds to read and about six to learn. You can also just start.

Play Pen Fight

The whole game in four lines

Two pens sit on a school desk, one in front of each player.
You take turns. On your turn you flick your own pen, once.
A pen that leaves the desk is out of the round.
The last pen still on the desk takes the round.

Everything after this — power, spin, which pen you brought, whether you go for the knockout or set up the next shot — is detail on top of those four lines. Nothing else is hidden from you and there are no special moves.

Controls: how a flick works

Put a finger or a cursor on your own pen, drag backwards, and release. It is a catapult, not a steering wheel: you are pulling the pen back against a spring that is not there, and then letting go of it.

Direction. The pen travels opposite to the way you dragged. Pull down and right, it goes up and left.
Power. The length of the drag. A full-power shot is a pull of roughly a third of the long edge of your screen; past that it stops getting stronger.
Where you grab it. Grab near the middle and the pen goes straight. Grab towards one end and it leaves spinning, which is how a shot curls off a rival's pen instead of stopping dead against it.
Cancelling. A drag shorter than about a finger-width counts as a tap, not a shot, so brushing the screen will not cost you your turn.

Power does not scale evenly with the drag: short pulls stay gentler than the distance suggests, so the fine end of the range — nudging your own pen a few centimetres out of danger — is easy to hit deliberately. That curve is why a light touch is a usable shot rather than an accident.

What counts as out

A pen is out when it goes over the edge of the desk and falls. It does not have to be your flick that sent it: if your own pen slides off under its own momentum, it is out, and your rival takes the round without having to touch it.

This is the rule that decides most matches, and it cuts both ways. The hardest shot on the desk is not the one that knocks a pen off — it is the one that knocks a pen off and leaves yours where you can defend it. Full power into a pen sitting near the edge will usually take it, and will usually send yours somewhere you did not choose.

Turns, and when a turn ends

Your turn is over the moment you release. After that the desk plays itself out: pens slide, collide, spin down and stop. The turn passes to your rival once everything has come to rest, and a single pen that will not stop wobbling cannot stall the match — the game resolves the turn regardless after a few seconds.

Nothing is scored until the desk is still. A pen teetering on the edge is not out yet, and it is genuinely worth watching: pens come back from a long way over.

Formats and scoring

Pen Fight is played in three lengths.

Format	Rounds	How it is won
One round	1	Whoever takes the round wins. The quick game.
Best of five	up to 5	First to three rounds. The match stops as soon as it is decided.
Best of seven	up to 7	First to four rounds.

That is scoring for two players. With three or four at the desk it changes, because a race between four people either never ends or is decided by whoever happened to still be in it. So a bigger desk plays the full distance and settles it on marks:

1 mark for every pen you send off the desk.
2 marks for being the last pen standing in a round.
When the rounds run out, the highest total owns the bench.

The practical difference is that knocking somebody out is worth something even when you are not going to survive the round yourself, so there is no point playing dead in a four-way.

Playing the bench

The single-player game is a ladder of eleven opponents rather than a difficulty slider. Ruwan is first: he swings at everything and will hand you the desk. Raju bai is eleventh, back row, and does not miss. You open the next opponent by banking three wins against the one in front of you.

Each opponent brings a different pen, and they bring it before the shop offers it to you — so by the time a pen is something you could own, you have spent three rounds on the other side of it and know what it does. See the pens for what each one is.

Playing other people

Online is a six-character room code. One person makes a room, everyone else types the code, and up to four sit at the same desk — with voice chat in the room, so you can hear the reaction to a shot the moment it lands. There is no account and no download. Playing with friends covers rooms, voice chat and sharing a round afterwards.

Common questions

Is Pen Fight free?

Yes. The game runs in the browser at no cost, with no download and no account required to play against the bench or to join a friend's room.

Do I need to install anything?

No. It is a web page. It runs on a phone browser or a desktop browser, and the heavy part — the 3D renderer and the physics engine — loads behind the lobby while you are still reading it, so the first screen arrives almost immediately.

Can I play Pen Fight on a phone?

Yes, and the controls were built for a thumb first. Drag and release works the same on touch and mouse.

Which pen is best?

None of them. The nine pens in the case were deliberately balanced so that every one of them wins between 45% and 55% of the time against every other one, which means the pick is a question of what suits your shot rather than a right answer. The reasoning is on the pens page.

How long is a match?

A round is usually under a minute. A best of five is three to five minutes, depending on how much of it goes to long defensive exchanges in the middle of the desk.

That is all of it. The rest is desk time.