Agario: Where getting bigger and bigger is a good thing

I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life trying not to get bigger. If any of you have tried the same, you know how difficult it is. If only getting bigger was a good thing. Well, guess what? In the game Agario, it is!

How to play Agario

Agario is relatively simple to play—but not necessarily simple to win. You start as a small circle (cell) in a field of other cells of various sizes. Run over a cell that is smaller than you and you take on its mass, thus making your cell bigger. If a bigger cell runs over you, it’s game over.

There are a few other strategies you can employ that keep the game interesting. One is that you can split your cell into two cells to speed up your cell to takeover others or avoid being taken over yourself since the bigger your cell gets, the slower you move.

Another strategy is to eject mass from your cell into others. This serves two purposes. One is to force another cell to get bigger than they want to which may cause them to run into a virus (which I think look like green Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups) which will destroy them. Another use of ejecting your mass is to offer a sort of sacrifice to a bigger cell in hopes they will reward you by staying away from you.

Suggested improvement

About the only thing I don’t like about Agario is that you can choose whatever name you want to appear on your cell. Unfortunately, some players use this to their advantage to come up with some horrible words to use as their user name. I know this is hard to police but perhaps Agario could have some sort of “report inappropriate user name” feature to minimize this.

Helpful hints

Both of my sons have spent many an hour playing Agario so I thought it would be fun to ask them to come up with some helpful hints to others who are new to the game. Here’s what they came up with:

• If you are a small cell, you can hide from bigger cells inside a virus.
• If a cell is near a virus, eject some mass towards them so that they grow bigger and cover the virus, causing them to split.
• Eject mass into a virus until the point where it grows too big and creates another virus towards another cell (player).
• If you nickname your cells with certain pre-defined names, a skin will be applied to your cell. For example, if you name your cell “Indiana”, your cell will appear as the Indiana state flag. You can download additional skins at Agar.io Skins.
• If another cell is bigger than you before you split, they can end up bigger than you after you split. BEWARE!

How to get Agario

Agario is available as a free app [iOS | Android] for your smartphone/tablet or you can play right on your computer by going to Poki in your Internet browser.

Note: This blog post was co-created in cooperation with Poki, an online gaming company developing cross platform games and publisher of the Agario game.