Tap to throw
Tap to throw
Throw pins into a spinning target without hitting existing pins.
A blue wheel spins near the top of the play area and a pin waits below it. Tap anywhere in the play area to throw: the pin flies straight up and sticks into the bottom edge of the wheel, at the six o'clock position, about 0.15 seconds later. Taps made while a pin is still in the air are ignored, so a nervous double tap cannot fire a second pin.
Every game starts with three pins already in the wheel, spaced evenly a third of a turn apart. The wheel spins in a random direction, clockwise or anticlockwise, and keeps that direction for the whole game.
If your pin lands in open space it stays there, turns with the wheel and scores +1. If it lands closer than 7 degrees (centre to centre) to a pin that is already in the wheel, it is a collision and the game ends immediately.
The wheel starts at about 84 degrees per second, one full turn every 4.3 seconds, and gets 3.6 degrees per second faster with every pin you land: about 2.3 seconds per turn after 20 pins and 1.6 seconds after 40. The speed only changes when a pin lands, never while you wait. The wheel's spin and the pin's flight both run on real elapsed time rather than on screen frames, so the wheel turns at the same rate on a 60 Hz or a 120 Hz screen.
Your best score is saved on this device. When a game ends you can save any score above zero to the Hall of Fame or tap New for a fresh wheel.
Goal: land as many pins as possible without a collision.
Your tap launches the pin at once, but the wheel keeps turning while it flies, so the whole game is timing the gap. Do not fire at where an open space is now — fire a hair before it rotates under your pin, since the throw still takes a moment to land. As the wheel speeds up that lead grows, so let your sense of its rhythm, not your panic, decide when to release.
Each pin you land becomes another obstacle rotating around, so the board gets more crowded the better you do. Aim deliberately at the widest remaining gap rather than the nearest one, and try to space your pins evenly instead of clustering them, which leaves bigger windows for later throws. When the wheel is fast and packed, patience beats greed: wait for a clean opening to come around rather than forcing a throw into a tight gap.
The 7-degree rule decides which gaps are real. A new pin needs 7 degrees of clearance on both sides, so a gap must be wider than 14 degrees before it has even one safe landing spot, and the usable window is whatever is left after taking 7 degrees off each end. In practice, if the clear space between two neighbouring pin heads is less than about two heads wide, that gap is already closed, even though one more head looks as if it would fit. The same arithmetic changes how you fill medium gaps: a pin dropped dead centre into a 30-degree gap leaves two 15-degree slivers with a window of about one degree each, while a pin landed near one neighbour leaves a single gap of over 20 degrees that can still take another throw. Even spacing is right while the gaps are wide; off-centre placement saves the late game.
The flight takes about 0.15 seconds every time, so the lead you need stays nearly constant in time even though it grows in angle: about 13 degrees of wheel turn at the start, 23 at 20 pins and 34 at 40. Instead of hunting for a new aiming point as the wheel speeds up, keep tapping the same split second before the gap reaches the bottom. There is also a hard ceiling: with three starting pins and a 7-degree minimum spacing, the wheel cannot hold more than 48 extra pins even with perfect packing, so every run ends sooner or later. Long runs are won by wasting little space early, not only by quick reactions late.