Bigger Dot tactics: how we lasted 4:26 in Classic, why Hardcore punishes one mistake, and what Bot Battle teaches

When we first wrote about Bigger Dot, the arena won every round we played and none lasted longer than 20 seconds. That article, Bigger Dot lands on the Mac App Store, covered the modes and controls. This one is the follow-up: we went back on 18 October 2026 for two sessions in the web version on a desktop browser, played Classic, Hardcore and a couple of Bot Battles, and wrote down every Game Over card.

The short version: one Classic run lasted 4 minutes 26 seconds and reached first place on the live leaderboard. Then a single collision threw almost all of it away. Most of the tips below come from that run.

First: the Play button now starts "Original"

The menu has changed since our first article, and it matters before you read any tips. The big orange Play button is now labelled Original and launches the first Bigger Dot arena, restored as a separate mode: a darker arena, a different score line and no live leaderboard. The four modes we describe here (Classic, Time Attack, Hardcore, Bot Battle) live in Arena.

• To pick an Arena mode, tap Mode in the bottom bar, choose one, then ← Back.
• The pill under the Play button then reads, for example, Arena · Classic ›. Tapping the pill starts that mode straight away.

Our first two short runs this morning went to Original by mistake, so we left them out of everything below.

Our six rounds

We also watched two Bot Battles, which are spectator rounds and have no score of our own. Every number in the table was read off the Game Over card.

How the 4:26 Classic run worked

That round followed a plain routine, and it is the one we would recommend to anyone still dying in the first minute:

1. Graze along the walls. We kept to the arena edges and ate food, which kept most threats on one side of us instead of all around.
2. Run from anything bigger, every time. No "maybe I can slip past". If a bot looked larger, we turned away.
3. Never press W. In our first article a single W press cost us more than 40 points at a size we could not spare. This time we left it alone completely.
4. Keep moving toward food. Your score slowly leaks when you are not eating. We watched it slide from about 300 to 245 during a quiet stretch before we found food again.

Growth was slow at first and then came in jumps. On screen we had 301 points at 1:50 and 607 at 2:33. By 4:04 we had 1339 and were first on the leaderboard, ahead of bots such as Feral (1027) and Fang (936). The big jumps came from eating smaller bots we happened to pass, ten of them in the whole round, not from food. Food is what keeps you alive. Bots are what make you big.

Our one Space split in that round was a failure. We aimed at a bot called Phoenix that was clearly smaller, but it had already turned away, so the split caught nothing and our two halves drifted until they merged again. Split only when the target is close and heading toward you or pinned against something.

What ended it: splitters

In the last seconds of the round our big dot ran into a spiky splitter and broke into pieces. Fang, which had been well behind us on the leaderboard at 4:04, ate them. The card says it all: peak score 1780, final score 100. The help screen lists splitters as hazards, but at 200 points you barely notice them. At 1,500 points they are the most dangerous thing on the map.

So the most useful tip we can give: the bigger you are, the wider you should steer around splitters. The camera zooms out as you grow, so the field looks roomier than it is. Change course early.

Hardcore: one mistake is permanent

Hardcore's mode card says "No merging, aggressive bots". In practice it felt fast in both directions. In our better round we had 510 points at 0:21 and 775 at 0:55, faster growth than in Classic, and the card later showed we had briefly been first.

Then a splitter hit broke us into seven small pieces. In Classic they would eventually join back together. In Hardcore they never do, and a bot called Bait picked them off in about ten seconds. Final score 110 from a peak of 890.

Our second Hardcore round was the opposite lesson. We played very cautiously, found little food, and at 0:22 a bigger yellow bot, OrbLord, simply caught us. Being careful is not enough on its own in Hardcore: you need to keep growing, because the aggressive bots will come to you.

Our Hardcore rules after two rounds:

• Do not press Space at all unless the split will clearly win the game for you. Every split is permanent.
• Treat splitters as walls. A hit leaves you in pieces that never rejoin.
• Grow early, while the bots around you are small. We gained over 500 points in the first minute of our good round. A slow start just means a bigger bot finds you.

We only played two Hardcore rounds, so take "aggressive" as our impression, not a measurement. A bot did sit right among our fragments after the splitter hit.

What Bot Battle teaches

Bot Battle puts you in the stands. The HUD still shows a score that never moves (0 in one watch, 227 in the other), but the round is all AI dots. Watching it for a minute or two showed us how the bots hunt:

• Big bots split to trap. In our first watch, Fang split into about 15 pieces and herded smaller dots along the red arena wall, growing from 2681 points at 0:33 to 3518 at 1:11. Another bot, Voidix, tried the same trick with about 10 pieces and had vanished from the leaderboard by 1:11.
• Splitting has a cost for bots too. In our second watch, Giga started at 3763 points and was down to 3287 at 0:47, spread out in about 20 pieces near several splitters.
• The leaderboard churns fast. Small bots are eaten and replaced constantly, which is why the top of the board changes so often in Classic.

The takeaway for your own rounds: when you see a large bot spread into a line of pieces, it is hunting. Get away from walls and corners near it, because that is exactly where it pins its prey. Bot Battle had no end card in either of our watches; we left through Settings → Return to Home, which warns that leaving resets the run.

Quick checklist

• Start Arena modes from the Arena · … pill, not the Original button.
• Graze food near the walls, but leave the wall when a split-up big bot is nearby.
• Run from anything bigger. Never press W while small.
• Grow from food, get big from small bots you pass.
• Split only onto a close, smaller target that is not escaping.
• The bigger you get, the wider your berth around splitters. In Hardcore, treat them as walls.