Tap to switch color
Tap to switch color
Tap to cycle your ball through four colours so it matches each falling bar at the moment it arrives. Bars fall faster and arrive more often as your score climbs, and one mismatch ends the run.
Your ball sits near the bottom of the stage, and full-width bars fall from the top, each in one of four colours: red, green, blue or yellow. Press Start and, a moment later, the first bar appears. The ball always begins red.
Tap anywhere on the stage to change the ball's colour. Each tap moves one step around a fixed loop — red, green, blue, yellow, then back to red — and there is no way to step backwards, so going from green to red takes three taps.
Each bar is judged at one exact moment: when its middle crosses the centre of the ball, marked by the faint line drawn across the stage. If the colours match, the bar passes through and you score 1 point; if not, the run ends on the spot. There are no lives. Every bar's colour is picked at random, so the same colour can come several times in a row.
Bars start at 100 pixels per second and fall 8 faster for every point, up to 450 from 44 points on. A new bar appears every 1.3 seconds at first, 25 milliseconds sooner per point, down to one every 0.55 seconds from 30 points. On a typical phone the first bar takes five or six seconds to fall, and early in a run up to five or six bars are on screen at once; at top speed a bar reaches your ball about 1.3 seconds after it appears.
Your best score is kept on this device, and after any run worth at least one point you can save it to the Hall of Fame.
Goal: pass as many bars as you can.
The mistake is reacting to the bar only when it arrives; by then you are mashing taps and overshooting the colour. Instead, read the bar's colour while it is still high on the screen, count how many taps it takes to cycle the ball there (red, green, blue, yellow in fixed order), and make exactly those taps early so you arrive set and waiting.
Because tapping always advances through the same loop, plan the shortest route: if you are on red and need blue, that is two taps, but green to red means going all the way round. As bars start coming faster and more often, keep half your attention on the bar behind the one you are clearing, since you will need to start cycling for it the instant the first passes. Calm, pre-counted taps survive far longer than frantic over-cycling that blows past the colour you wanted.
Use the judgement line. Because the colour is checked only when a bar's middle reaches the centre of the ball, a bar that is already covering the top of the ball can still be matched with a last tap: its edge touches the ball about 31 pixels before the check. That is a comfortable 0.3 seconds at the opening speed but only about 0.07 seconds at top speed, so late rescues all but stop working in the 40s. The reverse also holds: never start tapping for the next bar until the current one has crossed the line, because a tap a fraction too early changes the colour while the old bar is still being judged and ends the run.
Know the cost of each bar. With four colours drawn at random, one bar in four needs no tap at all and the rest split evenly between one, two and three taps — 1.5 taps on average. From 30 points the bars arrive about 0.55 seconds apart, so a three-tap change has to fit into roughly half a second. Those are the four "one step back" pairs — green to red, blue to green, yellow to blue and red to yellow — so learn them by heart and start their taps the instant the previous bar clears the line; a one-tap change can afford to wait. Alternating two thumbs keeps a quick triple tap more even than drumming with one finger, and every touch on the stage counts as a separate tap.