Tower Stack, a one-tap block stacking game

A single floor slides back and forth above whatever you have built so far. You tap once. It drops. If you caught the edge cleanly the tower gains a storey and its windows come on; if you were off by a fraction, the part hanging over the side is sliced away and falls into the dark, and the piece that is left is all the width you get on the next turn.

That is the whole game, and it is the reason a run rarely ends the way you expect. Nothing kills you outright for a long stretch. Instead your mistakes are stored up in the shrinking width of the tower until there is barely a ledge left, and then one ordinary-looking tap misses it entirely. The tower does not collapse dramatically. It just runs out of room to stand on.

How to play

1. Watch the floor. It travels left to right above the tower and reverses at the edges. It starts slow and gets quicker with every storey you add.
2. Tap to drop. Anywhere on the board works. On a keyboard, the space bar or enter does the same thing.
3. Keep the width. The overlap between your floor and the one beneath it becomes the new floor. Overhang is lost for good.
4. Chase perfects. Land close enough to dead centre and nothing is sliced at all, and every window on that storey lights at once. Four of those in a row and the tower widens back out.
5. Miss and it ends. No overlap at all means the floor falls past the tower, and the run is over.

Reading the board

The small ticks down the left edge are a floor count, numbered every five storeys. They are the clearest signal that you are actually climbing, because the camera holds the top of the tower in roughly the same place on screen and lets the city slide downward instead. When the street lights drop away below the frame and only stars are left beside you, you are going well.

The badge under the floor counter tracks your current run of perfect drops. It resets the moment you shave off any width at all, which makes the fourth perfect in a row feel considerably more tense than the first three.

Three things that help

Aim for the edge you can see

Most people track the centre of the moving floor and try to line it up with the centre of the tower. That is hard, because neither centre is marked. Watching one edge of the moving floor against the matching edge below it is far easier, and it is the same information.

Drop early, not late

There is a small delay between deciding to tap and the tap registering, and the floor keeps travelling through it. As the speed climbs, that delay is worth more and more width. Committing a hair before the floor looks right tends to land closer than waiting for it to look perfect.

Take the recovery when it is offered

A narrow tower is not a lost run. Narrow floors move the same distance as wide ones but cover less ground relative to their own size, which oddly makes them a little easier to judge. String four clean drops together and you get width back, and a run that looked finished at eight storeys wide can carry on for another twenty.

Why one-tap games hold up

There is nothing to learn here. You understand the rules from the first drop, which means the entire difficulty lives in execution rather than in knowing what to do. That is a good shape for something you play in a spare minute: no tutorial, no progression to remember between sessions, and a single number at the end that either beats the last one or does not.

It also means the game is honest with you. Every storey you lost is visible in the width of the tower, in order, from the bottom up. A run reads like a record of its own mistakes, lit up floor by floor, which is a surprisingly satisfying thing to look at just before it ends.

Questions

Do I need to install anything?

No. It runs in the browser page you are already on. There is no download, no account and no sign-up.

Does it work offline?

Once the page has loaded it does not need the network again, so it will keep working if your connection drops mid-run.

Is there a time limit?

No. You can let the floor slide as long as you like before dropping it. The only pressure is the speed it travels at.

What happens if I rotate my phone?

The board resizes to fill the screen and the run carries on. Portrait gives you more tower in view, which most people prefer.

Can I turn the sound off?

It starts off. The button at the bottom of the board turns a short click on for each drop if you want it.

Is my score shared anywhere?

Only if you choose to. The best height is stored locally in your browser and is never sent anywhere on its own. The share button on the game-over card makes a picture of your tower in the page itself and hands it to your device’s own share sheet — nothing is uploaded to this site.