How to play

Drag in the grip strip. The lane below the court is where your finger goes; the racket sits above it, so your hand never covers the thing you are aiming with.

Hit the lit panels. Every glass panel at the far end is a target — five across the back wall and two down each side, exactly as a real court is panelled. One is lit at a time.

Two ways to unlock. Your best single rally unlocks racket colours; the targets you hit add up over every session and unlock ball trails. One rewards a good rally, the other rewards coming back.

Targets, streaks, badges and rewards are kept on this device only. Nothing about Pongel is sent anywhere.

Drag the ball anywhere to see where all four players should be, or drag a player and the other three adjust around them.

Three modes. In play is where it opens — you land mid-rally with all four in a valid shape. Serve starts in the serve formation instead: drag the ball toward the net and watch the server run in behind it. Free is a whiteboard where every piece moves on its own. The warnings stay on in free form, so a shape you diagram by hand is still checked.

Draw on it. The Draw and Arrow tools work in both In play and Free. In free form you are marking up a shape you arranged yourself; in play the rule is still moving the other three, so an arrow over it says “here is where the model wants you, and here is the run I want you to make”. Switch back to Move to drag pieces again — your lines stay where they are.

Tap the court to give it the whole screen, and tap again — or press Escape — to come back. Drawings are kept for this visit only and never leave your device.

Three shapes, not one. A pair is either attacking (both up, about 2 m off the net, 3–4 m apart), defending (a step behind the service line, two steps off each side glass — roughly 7 m apart, because a lob can go to either corner), or in transition through mid-court. Notice the gap: partners stand about twice as wide defending as they do at the net.

What the warnings mean. “Not level” only appears for a pair at the net, where holding the same line closes the angles — a covering pair is meant to be staggered. “No man’s land” appears when a pair is stranded in mid-court, and stays quiet when they are moving up through it after a good lob, which is exactly right.

Court zones. Turn them on to see the three depth bands the tool is judging you against — attacking, mid-court and defending — on both halves. The warm middle band is the same mid-court the “no man’s land” warning refers to. The dashed lines inside the outer bands mark where a pair should actually stand: 2 m off the net attacking, a large step behind the service line defending. The bands are where you are; the dashed lines are where you should be.

Distances come from padel coaching sources and are drawn to a regulation court, so a player standing “on the service line” here is standing where they would on a real one. How hard a pair tracks the ball sideways is still a tuned estimate.