How to play
A block travels from one side of the board to the other at a constant rate. You press once, it stops where it is and lands on the stack. The part of it that sticks out past the block underneath is cut off and tumbles away, and whatever survives becomes both the new top of the tower and the width of the next block you get. Miss the tower completely and the run is over.
That single rule is the whole design. Width never grows — it can only stay the same or shrink — so a run is really a slow accounting of every pixel you have given away. Four careless floors at the start can cost you sixty pixels of landing zone, and you will feel the bill twenty floors later when the same press that used to be comfortable no longer touches anything. A drop that lands within two pixels of the block below is treated as a perfect fit: nothing is sliced, the width is preserved and the Perfect counter goes up.
Pressure comes from one place only, which is the speed. Each floor adds a little to how fast the block travels, up to a ceiling, and the three starting speeds decide how quickly you reach the point where you are pressing on instinct rather than judgement. There are no rotations, no shapes to fit together and no queue of upcoming pieces — one block, one press, one decision per floor.
Controls
- Keyboard: Space or Enter drops the block. P pauses and resumes.
- Mouse: click anywhere on the board, or use the Drop button below it if you would rather keep the pointer still.
- Touch: tap anywhere on the board. Page scrolling is suppressed over the board so a quick sequence of taps does not drag the article up and down.
- On screen: two dashed guide lines mark the left and right edges of the block you are landing on. They are the reference the strategy below is built around.
Where the pixels actually go
The first thing worth internalising is that you should press early. Between your decision and the block stopping there is a gap made of your own reaction, the input device and the screen, and the block keeps moving through all of it. At 150 pixels per second, a quarter of a second of that chain is roughly 38 pixels of travel — comfortably more than most people's margin for error. You are not aiming at where the block is; you are aiming at where it will be when the press finally lands.
The second is to watch one edge, not the whole block. Pick the leading edge and the guide line it is approaching, and press when that edge crosses your chosen trigger point. Trying to judge a whole rectangle against another whole rectangle gives your eye two moving comparisons; watching one line against one line gives it a single, clean event.
The third is to read your own bias between floors. If the last cut came off the left side, you were early relative to that direction, so nudge your trigger point later on the next one. Because the direction alternates every floor, a player who is consistently late will see the tower staircase in one direction and then the other, which is easy to spot and easy to correct.
The fourth only matters once things are thin: stop chasing perfect drops. Under about forty pixels of width, going for a two-pixel fit and missing entirely is far worse than settling for a sloppy landing that keeps ten pixels alive. A tower that survives on scraps still counts every floor. Bank the height, take the loss, and press again.
Rough bands we hit while testing this board ourselves, published as estimates and nothing more: on Steady, 15 to 22 floors is a normal run and past 30 means your timing is calibrated. On Brisk expect 12 to 18, and on Relentless 8 to 14. Once the width readout drops under 40 pixels, most runs have about three or four floors left in them.
Why one-button timing games hold up
Games built on a single well-timed press are one of the oldest shapes in arcade design, and they survive because they solve the hardest problem in the genre for free: the player never has to learn a control scheme. There is one input, its meaning never changes, and the entire skill ceiling sits in when you use it rather than in remembering what else you could have done.
What makes this particular version keep its teeth is that the difficulty is partly self-inflicted. A game that only speeds up eventually becomes a wall that everybody hits at roughly the same place. Here the platform you are aiming at is the platform you built, so two players at the same floor can be in completely different situations — one with a comfortable landing strip, the other with a sliver held together by luck. Your mistakes are still on screen, stacked underneath you, which is a far better teacher than a message telling you that you were late.
The failure state is honest, too. When a block sails past the tower there is no ambiguity about whose fault it was and no hidden state to blame, and the tumbling slice gives you an immediate reading of how far off you were. Small, readable feedback like that is why the format has outlived far more complicated ideas — and why it is still worth building a new one in a browser tab.
Questions players ask
Can the tower ever get wider again?
No. Width goes down or stays the same, never up. A perfect drop preserves what you have; every other drop costs exactly the distance you missed by.
What counts as a perfect drop?
Two board pixels or less between your block and the one below. Nothing is sliced, the counter goes up and the beep is higher. The tolerance is in board pixels, so a bigger monitor does not make it easier.
Why does the same press feel late on my phone?
Touch input adds delay that varies by device, so a press calibrated on a mouse lands a few pixels behind on a phone. Play a throwaway round on any new device and adjust your trigger point.
Does the run end if the block gets extremely thin?
Below six pixels, yes — there is nothing left to aim at, so the height is recorded and the run closes. Most runs end the other way, with a block that misses everything.