Bots fill out a thin room. Three people make a cramped game; add two or three bots and it plays like a real ring. They join when you hit START, and they play through exactly the same controls a phone does — no cheating, they just read the bounce well or badly depending on the setting. A game with any bot in it is not recorded to the hall of fame or the season table, so practice never lands on the leaderboard the room is playing for.
How it works: everybody in the room is a wall on the same ring, and there is one ball. Whoever it gets past loses a life. Run out of lives and your wall is taken away — the ring is redrawn with one side fewer and the survivors close ranks, without the ball ever stopping for long. The ring never drops below four sides: at three players you keep the square and the empty side is bricked up, because a triangle funnels the ball into the same two corners all night. When two of you are left the ring flattens into a rectangle and it's ordinary Pong to the finish.
On your phone the ring is turned so your wall is always along the bottom, whichever side of the room you're sitting on. The big screen never turns, so it stays the shared picture everybody argues over. Drag anywhere on the arena to move your paddle, or hold the arrows.
Where the paddle hits matters. Catch the ball on the edge of your paddle and you'll cut it away at an angle; catch it flat and it comes straight back. Every hit speeds the ball up and there is no cap — it climbs until somebody cracks, so every rally ends.