The weapons worth learning first
The bazooka is your default and your workhorse: variable power, any angle, and the one weapon whose shots the wind will actually push around, so glance at which way the wind gauge leans before you commit to a long throw. The grenade is the smarter cousin. You set both the fuse (one to five seconds) and how much it bounces, which lets you drop it right onto a worm tucked behind a hill where a bazooka would only slam into the dirt. The shotgun is the reliable middle ground: two shots in a straight line every turn, and you can shuffle to a cleaner angle between them.
For close range, the fire punch and the dragon ball both hit for a flat 30 and knock a worm clean off its footing, and the punch carves upward through terrain, so it doubles as a panic escape. When you actually want something dead, dynamite (up to 75, though you get five seconds to run clear) or kamikaze (fly halfway across the level, then blow yourself up on arrival) are your finishers. Spend a dying worm on a kamikaze run and it stops being a loss.
The map kills more worms than the enemy does
Health is only one way to lose a worm. Knock one off the left or right edge and it's gone no matter how much health it was carrying, and the same goes for anything that drops into the water along the bottom. This cuts both ways: a shot that shoves an enemy into the sea does far more than chip at its health bar, which is why a good push toward the edge often beats going for raw damage.
Watch your own footing too. Jump or fall from a high spot down to a much lower one and your worm plants itself headfirst in the ground and forfeits the rest of the turn, a wasted move you feel keenly when the clock is already tight. And when a worm finally does run out of health, it doesn't quietly disappear: it detonates into a gravestone, and that little blast can nick any teammate standing too close.
Every shot comes down to timing and a gauge
Firing most weapons means holding the button to build power on the gauge, then releasing. The longer you hold, the farther the shot travels, so the same bazooka can lob a shell two feet or halfway across the level depending on when you let go. It takes a few turns to feel, and you will overshoot early on.
The wind gauge sits there tempting you to overthink it. In practice only the bazooka's arc bends noticeably with the wind, so for grenades, close-range hits, and most of the roster you can leave it out of your head. What you can't ignore is the clock. Each turn is capped, and if you dither over picking a weapon the turn just ends with nothing thrown. If the whole round runs out of time, the team holding the most total health wins it, which makes stalling with a lead a genuine tactic against the CPU or a friend.
Can you start a round with the super weapons?
No. The three best toys in the game, the Exploding Sheep, the Banana Bomb, and the Minigun, can't be picked from the menu when your turn begins. Even with them switched on in the options, they only ever arrive inside crates that drop into the round, so half of using them is grabbing the crate before an opponent shoots it out of the air.
They're worth the scramble. The Banana Bomb is a cluster bomb with dynamite-level punch on every fragment, and the Sheep waddles off across the ground and blows up like a stick of dynamite, either when you set it off or on its own after about twenty seconds. One catch with the Sheep: it can't climb anything your worms can't, so send it along flat ground toward a target instead of expecting it to hop a wall.
Digging, escaping, and the tools that aren't weapons
Not every turn should be a shot. The blowtorch bores sideways through terrain and the drill goes straight down, and both are how you burrow a worm out of the open into a pocket the enemy can't reach before its next turn. The teleport is the panic button. Drop a worm into any empty gap big enough to hold it and the turn ends, which is the fastest exit when the ground underneath has been blasted down to a sliver.
Two small ones are easy to overlook. Prod does no damage at all, but a shove at the right moment can tip an enemy off a cliff into the water, which is often deadlier than any weapon. Skip Go ends the turn cleanly when you'd rather wait out the clock. All of this takes a couple of minutes to pick up once you start a match online in the browser, and knowing when not to fire is what turns a lucky win into a deliberate one.