Stick Bridge — a free one-tap bridge building game in your browser

Stick Bridge gives you one control and one problem. A gap of some awkward width separates you from the next platform; hold your finger down and a stick grows upward from the edge you are standing on; let go and it topples over the gap. If the tip reaches the far platform you walk across it. If it falls short you walk out onto it anyway, it tips, and you go down with it. If you held too long, the stick overshoots the platform entirely and you stroll straight off the end of it.

That is the entire game. It is free and needs no download: it runs in any browser, with one thumb on a phone or the space bar on a desktop. Every platform you cross is a point, and landing the tip on the green stripe at the centre of the next platform is worth an extra one. The gaps widen and the platforms narrow the further you get, and once the platforms can get no narrower the stick starts growing faster, so a run always ends eventually; restarting takes one tap. Your best five runs are kept on your own device, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.

How to play

• Hold anywhere on the playfield — or hold Space — and the stick grows. It stops growing when it runs out of sky.
• Let go to drop it. The stick falls flat across the gap; you cannot take it back.
• Reach the far platform and your character walks over. Anywhere on the platform counts.
• Hit the green stripe in the centre of the platform for PERFECT — a bonus point, and the beep climbs with every perfect in a row.
• Too short or too long is the same death: you walk to the end of your own bridge and fall off it.
• The gap is different every time, so there is no rhythm to memorise — only a length to judge.
• It gets harder in steps. Every three crossings the platform gets tighter; once it can shrink no further, the stick starts growing faster instead.
• When you miss, the game tells you by how much, in seconds — "0.09s TOO SHORT" is something you can act on next time.

Why the long bridges are so much harder than the short ones

Nothing about a wide gap is mechanically harder than a narrow one: it is the same hold and the same release, just more of it. The difficulty comes from you. Letting go on the right beat gets harder the longer you have been holding, so the short hops at the start forgive a lot and the long ones later forgive very little, while the platform you are aiming at only ever gets narrower.

The game leans on that in two stages. For the first couple of dozen crossings the platform shrinks and the gap widens, which is the part you can see. After that the platform stops shrinking, because any narrower and it no longer reads as somewhere to land, and the stick starts growing faster instead: same target, less time to let go. The second stage has no ceiling, so the run keeps tightening for as long as you keep crossing, closing on a window of about eight hundredths of a second without ever quite reaching it.

Two things help. Stop watching the growing stick and watch the far edge of the gap: the stick's height above your platform is exactly the length it will have once it lies flat, so the job is to compare two lengths pointing in different directions, and that is easier with your eyes on the target than on the tip. And take the green stripe seriously even when you do not need it. Aiming at the middle leaves you half the platform's width of margin on either side, so chasing perfects is also the safest way to play.

More games

If one-tap timing is your thing, try Stack Rush or Flappy Dot, or browse all games.