Leaderboard
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About Updraft
A one-button flyer, made for phones. Tap and the bird climbs; stop and it falls. Everything else is the gaps in the rock coming at you, and you get one point for each one you get through.
What makes it ours is where the leaderboard lives. Instead of sitting in a table under the game, every score above you is hung across the gap that would beat it — with the player's name on it. Pass gap 24 and you have just gone by whoever was sitting on 23, and you watch their name tear in half as you go through. Your own best is the gold ribbon. The player in first place is wearing a crown, and if you get that far you take it off them and keep it for the rest of the run. It turns a number you are trying to beat into a queue of people you can see coming.
The sky is the other half of the progress: dawn, day, dusk, night, a thunderstorm and finally the aurora at a hundred gaps. It gets faster and the gaps get narrower until gap ninety, and then it stops getting harder — from there it is only a test of how long you can keep concentrating.
How to play
- Phone: tap anywhere on the screen. The whole thing is the button.
- Desktop: click, or press Space / ↑ / W.
- Hitting the rock or the ground ends the run. The top of the screen does not — you bump your head and carry on.
- One point a gap. There are no bonuses, so every score on the board is directly comparable with yours.
Tips
- Tap in a rhythm rather than in reaction. A flap lifts you about a fifth of the screen, so roughly two taps carries you from one gap to the next.
- Aim at the middle of the gap, not at the edge you are nearest to.
- Small, frequent taps hold a line much better than one big one. Most first runs end against the top of the rock, not the bottom.
- The ribbons tell you how much further you need to go. If the next name is four gaps away, that is four gaps, not a mountain.
- Play with the sound on. The click as you clear a gap and the whisper of a near miss both tell you where you are without looking at the score.
FAQ
Is it free? Do I need an account? It's free, paid for by ads. No account: you only type a name if you want to post a score.
Whose names are on the ribbons? Real scores from this game's leaderboard, pulled in when the run starts. Post a score yourself and you become one of the ribbons everybody else has to fly through.
What if the leaderboard is empty or offline? The game plays exactly the same — you just race the gold ribbon, which is your own best.
Is it phone-only? No. It's built for phones, but it plays the same with a mouse, the space bar or a gamepad.
Does the top of the screen kill me? No. Only the rock and the ground do. Panic-flapping into the ceiling is the first thing everybody does and it seemed a poor thing to lose a run to.
More games like this
- Overstack — the other one-tap game on the site: time the drop instead of timing the climb.
- Gravity Dash — also about falling on purpose, with the gravity switched rather than fought.
- Moonhaul — thrust physics again, but with a load swinging underneath you.
Or read Why one-button games are secretly the hardest — one of our write-ups on how these games are built and how to play them better.