Rope Swing — a free one-finger swinging game in your browser

Rope Swing drops you over a canyon with nothing but a rope and one button. Hold it and a line snaps out to the nearest ring above and ahead of you, and from that instant you are a pendulum: you fall, the rope catches you, and the fall turns into a swing. Let go and you keep exactly the speed and direction you had at that moment — no more, no less. Let go at the bottom of the arc, where you are moving fastest, and you are fired across a gap that looked impossible. Hang on past it and you are trading that speed for height you did not need, because the rope frays through in two seconds and drops you wherever you happen to be.

The rings sit further apart the further you get, and every rough grab costs you speed you have no way to earn back at the same rate, so a run always ends the same way: one gap too many. There is no timer and nothing chasing you. The only thing between you and another hundred metres is whether you can read a swing. It is free, needs no download, and works with one thumb on a phone or the space bar on a desktop.

How to play

• Hold anywhere on the stage — or hold Space — to throw the rope. It always goes to the glowing ring.
• If no ring is glowing, nothing is in range and holding costs you nothing. Wait, or accept that you are falling.
• Let go at the bottom of the swing, the instant you are level and moving forward. That is where you are fastest, and speed is the thing you cannot get back.
• The rope frays through in two seconds and snaps on its own, usually at the worst moment. It is not a timer to play against, it is a reason not to hang around.
• Grab cleanly. Hooking a ring while you are still moving towards or away from it throws away that part of your speed — the rope can only pull sideways. A grab that wastes almost nothing scores CLEAN and pays a little speed back.
• Chain clean grabs to keep the pitch climbing. One rough grab resets the chain.
• Your score is the distance you covered, in metres. Your longest clean chain is recorded beside it.

Why letting go at the bottom beats letting go at the top

A pendulum hands back exactly what it was given. You come in fast and low, the rope catches you, and you trade speed for height on the way up; at the far end of the arc you are briefly still, and then the whole exchange runs backwards. Because it is symmetrical, the only thing you actually control is when you step out of it, and every instant offers a different bargain: fast and level at the bottom, slow and steep at the top.

Take the fast one. Thrown across flat ground a projectile goes furthest at forty-five degrees, which is the instinct almost everyone brings to a swinging game — but the ground here is not flat and you are not trying to land on it. The rings hang above you and the rope reaches twelve metres, so height is something you can buy back at the next grab, while speed is not: nothing in this canyon gives it to you. Measured against a bot that releases at a fixed angle and otherwise plays perfectly, letting go level covers about 1800 metres a run; eight degrees up costs a third of that, fourteen degrees more than half, and twenty-two degrees three quarters. Letting go early, while you are still coming down, is just as bad in the other direction — you leave before the swing has finished paying out.

The other half of the skill is the grab, and it is the half that is easy to miss. A rope can only pull along its own length, so the moment you attach, any part of your motion pointing straight at the ring or straight away from it is simply deleted — it becomes tension and it is gone. Cross a ring almost sideways and you keep nearly everything. Dive at it and you can hand over a third of your speed before the swing has even begun. That single rule is why a clean run and a scrappy one diverge so fast, and it is why the game pays you a little speed back for getting it right: it is the only income there is.

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