How to play
Tap, click or press space to flap. Fly through the gaps and avoid pipes and the ground.
About Hop Bird
Hop Bird gives you one button and a small yellow bird that would very much like to keep flying. Every tap makes it flap upwards. Every moment you are not tapping, it falls. Between you and a high score stands an endless row of green pipes, each with a gap just big enough to get through.
How it works
The bird stays a quarter of the way across the screen while the pipes slide towards it from the right. Each pair of pipes has an opening at a different height. Fly through cleanly and you score one point. Touch a pipe, hit the bottom of the screen or fly off the top, and the run is over. One more tap starts a new one.
That last rule catches people out. You cannot escape trouble by soaring over the top of the pipes, because the top edge of the screen ends the game as surely as the ground does.
Controls
Tap the screen, click the mouse or press the space bar. All three do the same thing: one flap. There is no way to steer left or right and no way to slow down. All your control comes from when you tap.
Finding the rhythm
New players tap too hard and too often. The bird shoots up, they panic, stop tapping, and it drops like a stone into the next pipe. The trick is to think of each tap as a small correction. A single flap lifts the bird a short, fixed distance and then gravity takes over again. Two or three evenly spaced taps hold it roughly level. Tap a touch faster to climb, a touch slower to sink.
Aim to pass through the lower half of each gap. A bird that is slightly low can be rescued with one tap. A bird that is too high has to wait for gravity, and gravity never seems to hurry when you need it to.
Look ahead, too. As soon as you clear one pipe, find the next gap and start drifting towards it. If it is much higher, begin climbing early with steady taps. If it is much lower, simply stop tapping and let the bird fall, then catch it with one flap just before the opening.
The pipes come at the same speed throughout, so the game never gets faster. What changes is you. Around the time your score reaches double figures your hands tighten up and you start overthinking taps that were automatic a moment ago. Staying relaxed is most of the skill.
What to expect from your scores
Getting through a single pipe on your first attempt is a fair result. Five in a row means the rhythm is starting to click. Ten is respectable, twenty is good, and anything past forty is the sort of score people take a screenshot of.
Why people keep playing
A run of Hop Bird can last three seconds. That is the appeal. Failure costs nothing, the restart is instant, and every crash is clearly your own fault, which makes it impossible not to try again. It is a perfect game for a short wait and a dangerous one to open when you have something else to do.
Hop Bird is free and runs in any modern browser, on a phone or a computer, with no download.