How to play Floppy

Floppy

Tap and the bird rises; do nothing and it falls. Between you and the far end is a run of gaps, and the whole run is worked out from the game's seed before anybody presses Ready, so every player flies exactly the same gaps in exactly the same places. You fly your own run on your own clock and nobody can get in your way. Whoever gets furthest takes the round, and if two of you stop at the same instant the round is a tie. Best of three rounds, up to five.

Play Floppy Leaderboard

Flying

Tap the play area, click it, or press space. All three do the same thing.
A tap is a tap. Holding your finger down flaps ONCE and then you fall with the button held, which is the commonest way to lose a first game.
Every tap gives the same push upward whatever you were doing. There is no stronger tap and no softer one.
The bird falls faster the longer it falls, up to a limit, so a long drop is much harder to pull out of than a short one.
The top of the screen stops you rather than killing you. Over-tap and you are held against the ceiling, and it is the fall afterwards that gets you.

The field everybody shares

The gaps come from the game's seed, so there is one field and every seat flies it. Nobody gets an easier run.
The gaps are evenly spaced and the height of each one is what changes. Nothing speeds up and nothing narrows: a run gets harder because you are tired, not because the game is.
Because the field is the same for everybody, a player who has flown this seed before has seen these gaps before. Games are seeded afresh, so that is only ever true within one game.
The seed is on the page from the start, which is how your screen knows where to draw the pillars.

What the second view is for

The small view beside or under your own shows the same run with everybody else in it.
Every living bird is at the same point along the run, because the field goes by at one speed for everybody, so what you are reading in that view is HEIGHT: who is comfortable and who is about to go.
A player who has gone down is drawn faded with the number of gaps they reached.
It matters most after you die, which under this game's ending rule is when you have nothing else to do: see below.

How a round ends

Your run ends when the bird touches a pillar or the ground. Your distance is the number of gaps you got through.
THE ROUND DOES NOT END WHEN YOU DO. It runs until every real player has finished, so dying first costs you the round and costs nobody else their flight.
A bot is not a real player. Its whole run is worked out the moment the round starts, so one person against bots ends the instant that person goes down, with no waiting at all.
If you close the tab mid-flight, the game finishes your run for you rather than forfeiting it: it flies on with no further taps and you keep the distance that gives you, which is usually not much. It waits about five seconds of silence first, which is roughly ten times the longest gap between taps anybody still flying leaves.
A run is stopped at three minutes however well it is going, so a round cannot be held open for ever by somebody who does not miss.
Furthest wins the round. The same distance exactly is a real tie and is recorded as one.
Every move has the same deadline, chosen when the table is made. In this game it is the dead hand on Ready rather than a limit on a tap.
Each round starts with Ready, so there is a Ready between rounds as well as at the beginning. Leave it unpressed until the deadline passes and the match is over and you have lost it: the others keep the rounds they won.

Worth knowing before you start

Aim to arrive at a gap slightly high rather than slightly low. Gravity only ever takes you down, so height is the margin you have left.
Tap early and often rather than late and hard. A late tap has to undo a fall that is already fast.
The gap after the one in front of you is already on screen. Looking at it is worth more than looking at your own bird.
Your distance is never sent by your screen. The game stores the moments you tapped and flies them again on the server, so what is recorded is what actually happened.

EVERY SEAT HAS ITS OWN CLOCK AND THERE IS NO SHARED WORLD. Your bird answers your thumb and nothing else: the other players cannot push you, block you or hurry you, and a bad connection cannot make your bird fly badly. What your screen sends is not where the bird is, it is THE MOMENT YOU TAPPED, counted from the start of your own run. The server flies those taps again against the same field and that is what your distance is, so your distance cannot be sent, claimed or edited by anything on your side. A tap that arrives late is still accepted at the moment it says it happened, within a window the clock can justify, which is what keeps a slow connection playable. The one thing that window does stop is claiming to be further into your own run than the time that has passed allows. A SCRIPT CAN FLY THIS GAME, and it is better to say so than to imply otherwise. The field has to be on your screen for your screen to draw it, and the flight is plain arithmetic, so a program reading the page can work out a perfect run before it starts. Nothing can prevent that, and hiding the field from the player would not: it would only stop the person while leaving the program untouched. What the clock does enforce is that nobody can fly FASTER than real time. So treat the leaderboard as what it is, a record of who flew well rather than a proof that a person flew at all, and treat a game against somebody you know as the real one.

Floppy terms

A flap: One tap. A fixed push upward, the same every time, and it only counts on the moment your finger goes down.
A gap: The hole between two pillars. Getting through one adds one to your distance.
Your distance: How many gaps you got through before you went down. It is the whole of your score and the only thing the round is decided on.
The field: The whole run of gaps, worked out from the seed before the game starts. One field per game, the same for every seat.
The second view: The smaller picture of the same run with the other players in it. Drawn from what the server has told your screen, never guessed.
Flown out: What happens to the run of somebody who stops playing: the game flies the rest of it with no taps and keeps whatever distance that reaches.

Playing it here

Against a person or the bot. The bot needs no account and starts at once. To play a person, be rated and keep your games, you need an account: an email address and a password.
At your own pace. Every move has a deadline you both see, from one minute to a week. A game can take an evening or it can take a fortnight.
Nothing to buy and nothing to win. No stakes, no prizes, no boosts, no undo. The only thing on offer is a place on a leaderboard, and only if you want one.
Every game can be checked. Anything decided by chance comes from the game's seed, and the seed is published the moment the game ends, so any finished game can be replayed and verified by anyone. See fair play.