Timber Chop — a free tree chopping game you play with one thumb

The tree never ends. You stand at the foot of it with an axe, and every tap takes one log out of the bottom so the whole trunk drops a notch. Tap the left half of the playfield and you chop from the left; tap the right half and you jump across and chop from the right. Some logs carry a branch, and when a branched log lands beside you it lands on whichever side the branch is pointing. If that is your side, the run is over.

The pressure comes from the bar across the top, which drains the whole time you are playing. Each chop puts a little back, but never quite as much as the tree takes, and the gap widens the longer you last. So there is no safe pace: you have to keep swinging to stay alive, and swinging fast is exactly when you stop reading the branches properly. It is free, needs no download, and works the same on a phone, a tablet or a keyboard.

How to play

• Tap the left or right side of the playfield to move to that side and chop. On a keyboard use ← and → (or A and D).
• Every chop refills the bar a little. When the bar empties, the run ends.
• A branch on your side kills you. Look at the log that is about to become the bottom one — if its branch points left, be on the right.
• A branch is never followed by another branch, so a dodge always has a free swing after it. Use that beat to look further up.
• Chop in a rhythm and the pitch climbs. Ten fast chops in a row is a FLOW bonus and a splash of extra time.
• Your score is the number of logs you got through. Restarting is one tap, and your best five runs stay on your own device.

The arithmetic that decides how long you last

Timber Chop is really a small budgeting problem wearing an axe. The bar holds four and a half seconds. It drains at one second per second when you start, and each chop hands you about a third of a second back — so you break even at roughly three chops a second, and anything slower is a countdown you cannot see the end of. Because the drain speeds up as your score climbs while the refund per chop shrinks, that break-even point keeps moving away from you: by a hundred logs you need something closer to five chops a second, and it never stops rising.

That is why the bar can look healthy and still be lost. What matters is not how full it is but whether your current tapping speed is above or below the break-even line, because a bar that is draining slowly is still draining. Most runs end two or three seconds after the player first notices they are behind.

The other half is reading ahead. Branches are generated so one never follows another, which means every branch comes with a guaranteed free swing behind it — and that free swing is the only moment in the game you have any spare attention. Spend it looking two or three logs up the trunk rather than at the one beside you. Players who watch the bottom log are reacting; players who watch the third log up are already standing on the correct side when it arrives, and they are the ones who get past fifty.

More games

If tapping fast is the fun, try Whack a Mole or the CPS Test, and for one-button timing try Stick Bridge or Pin Spin. Or browse all games.