Flappy Bird
Tap to flap through the pipes and beat your best.
FAQ
How do I play Flappy Bird?
What is the tapping rhythm?
How do score and best work?
Does it work on a phone?
How to use
- Tap to take off
The first tap launches the run. Every press (space / ↑ / tapping the canvas) gives one upward flap, and gravity pulls you back down the moment you stop.
- Hold a steady height
Rapid flapping rockets you into the ceiling. The winning rhythm is "tap, glide, tap": small corrections that keep the bird around mid-screen.
- Line up the gap early
Adjust your height before a pipe arrives, so you enter the gap level and centred. Both edges are lethal, so there is no room for correction inside the gap.
- Score one point per pipe
Each pair passed is 1 point. Pipe spacing is constant, so the challenge is purely mental; distance never matters, only pipes cleared.
- Instant restarts
Hitting a pipe, the ground or the ceiling ends the run. The panel shows your score and best, and one tap starts the next attempt immediately.
About this tool
Flappy Bird recreates the 2013 phenomenon: one button, pairs of pipes and a single gap each. The genius is in the physics. Every tap is only a small upward impulse, so your flight path is drawn entirely by the rhythm of your taps. That tiny delay between intention and motion is what makes it famously, addictively hard.
This version is tuned for the web and phones. A portrait canvas suits one-hand play, and the whole screen is the tap area. The gaps are slightly kinder than the original while keeping the same rhythm. Scores and your best are stored locally. A round takes well under a minute, which makes it ideal for quick challenges against yourself.
Every physics number here is a constant. Gravity pulls at 0.32 per frame, each flap injects a fixed upward impulse of 6.2, and pipes drift left at 2.3 pixels per frame. The gap is 128 pixels tall and pairs sit 190 pixels apart, both frozen. Difficulty never climbs with your score; variety comes only from the random gap heights. One point per pair cleared, and ground, pipe or ceiling contact all end the run.
How it works
The feel comes from discrete physics. Gravity accelerates the bird downward every frame, and each tap injects one fixed upward impulse, so the flight path is a sawtooth. Dense tapping climbs, sparse tapping sinks, and nothing in between glides. The original was released in 2013 by the Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen. At its peak it reportedly earned about fifty thousand dollars a day in ads. In February 2014 Nguyen pulled it from the stores himself, saying he could not keep making something so addictive.
The game is harsh but fair: one rule, instant death, and every crash traces back to your own rhythm. The real level is psychological. After a few clean pipes the pulse rises, fingers stiffen, and tap intervals shrink without being noticed, so the bird climbs into the top edge. Veterans train composure rather than speed. The space between pipes is the only correction window, and inside the gap you merely maintain. After two straight losses, a one-second reset of the tap-glide-tap rhythm recovers more points than any drill.
Gap placement comes from a random number, so two pipes in a row can sit at opposite heights. That tests how much correction you can fit between them. Pairs sit 190 pixels apart and move at 2.3 pixels per frame, so one pair takes roughly 83 frames to cross the screen. That span is your whole correction budget between gaps. Your best score lives in local storage under the key t55k6-flappy, and the game-over panel compares this run against it.
When to use it
- A thirty-second gauntlet
One round, one tap, instant restart: the perfect shape for just one try while the kettle boils or the queue crawls. Scoring by pipes passed means anyone can join the comparison instantly.
- Rhythm training
Tap spacing is the throttle, so a steady tap-glide-tap cadence beats fast fingers every time. After a few rounds you can feel how hand tension drags the score down.
- Head-to-head duels
Pass one phone around the table or swap score screenshots, and the lowest score buys the next round of tea. The simplicity of who flies worse is exactly what makes it a reliable icebreaker.
- Spacing as a metronome
A new pair arrives every 190 pixels, roughly one per second at full frame rate. Counting pipes beats staring at the bird, and misses drop once the count takes over.
Tips & tricks
- Stay low: enter gaps along their lower half. One small flap clears it, while flying high invites ceiling collisions.
- Correct your height between pipes, never inside the gap itself.
- After a streak of losses, pause for a second: feel beats force, and panicked tapping always flies worse.
- Treat the 190-pixel spacing as a metronome: after each gap, drift back toward mid-screen so the next entry starts level.
Things to watch
- Flapping to the ceiling
Under pressure, tap intervals shrink and the bird rockets upward. Every press is a full impulse, and there is no light tap, so holding height means stretching the interval, never adding force.
- Correcting inside the gap
Both edges of a gap are lethal, so big flaps after entering are self-destruction. Finish every height adjustment between pipes and enter the gap level, gliding through on maintenance alone.
- Instant-restart tilting
Hammering restart while the previous failure is still in your hands reproduces it perfectly. One pause and one shake of the hand, and the score usually climbs several pipes: rhythm, not mysticism.
- Believing the game speeds up
The 128-pixel gap and 190-pixel spacing never change, so higher scores feel harder only in your head. After a record, the real threat is tension, and a short break restores more than another practice round.