Flying Penguin
A polar bear with a bat, a penguin dropping out of the sky, and a sheet of Antarctic ice with nothing on it to stop a good hit. One swing decides the whole run.
- Players
- 1 alone, or 2–4 in a room
- Modes
- Start · Rush x5 · Versus
- Controls
- One tap or click. Space or Enter also swings
- A run takes
- Around fifteen seconds
- Languages
- English · 日本語
- Runs on
- A browser with WebGL
The whole game is one swing
A penguin falls from somewhere above the ice. You have a bear, a bat, and exactly one chance to meet it. Press at the right moment and the penguin leaves the bat, arcs out over the ice, comes down, skips, and rolls until friction takes the last of it. Where it stops is your distance, measured in metres to two decimal places.
Miss, and the run ends at 0m. There is no partial credit for a late swing and no second attempt inside a run — the retry button is right there, and a new penguin is four seconds away.
Beat your own best and the result card says NEW RECORD. That best sits in the top-left corner from then on, quietly, as the thing you are actually playing against.
Rush x5 — five in a row
Rush sends five penguins instead of one and adds every distance together. A single enormous hit will not carry the round on its own; a run where all five connect decently will usually beat a run with one monster and four whiffs.
Rush keeps its own separate best, so a bad afternoon in Rush never touches your single-swing record and vice versa.
Versus — a room and a link
Versus is the same swing, played against other people, and it is built around handing someone a URL rather than adding them as a friend. No game account or app installation is needed for browser play.
- Open Versus on the title screen and set the room up: single swings or Rush x5, two to four players, and whether the match is first to 1, 3 or 5 round wins. Names can be typed in or assigned automatically as P1, P2 and so on.
- Create room. You get a four-character room code, a QR code and a link. Send the link to people who are elsewhere; hold the QR up to people who are sitting across from you.
- Everyone who opens it picks a name and joins. Anyone who would rather not play can press Watch and follow the match as a spectator instead.
- Short a player? Fill with Comp puts the computer in the empty seats so three people are not stuck waiting for a fourth.
- The host starts, and everyone swings. Each round posts every player's distance side by side, and the first to reach the win target takes the match.
Two edge cases are handled rather than argued about. If the top of the table is a tie, one more round decides it. If literally everybody whiffs and the round is all zeroes, it does not count and is played again.
A match survives its host closing the tab: it moves on by itself after a moment, and the final screen simply says so. What you cannot do is start a rematch, because there is no longer anyone to start it. Someone opens a new room and sends a new link.
Sharing a run you are proud of
After a run, Share hands you a link. It is not a screenshot and it is not a video — whoever opens it can watch a replay of your run in their browser.
Whoever opens it lands on a replay screen with a ▶ on it, presses play, and watches the same penguin travel the same distance you did. They can then take a swing themselves, which is usually what happens.
Getting better at it
There is not much to learn and quite a lot to practise. Three things help more than anything else:
- Watch the fall, not the bear. The penguin's descent is what your timing is keyed to. The swing animation is feedback, and by the time you are reading it the decision is already made.
- Early beats late. Both misses are zero, but a swing that fires slightly early tends to be recoverable across five shots in a way that habitually swinging late is not.
- In Rush, play the average. Five reasonable hits beat one spectacular one. Chasing a record on the first penguin is how Rush rounds get thrown away.
Settings, sound and what is stored
The gear icon on the title screen holds three things: language (English or Japanese), sound, and vibration on phones that support it. Sound also toggles with the M key if you are at a keyboard and someone has just walked in.
Your two best distances — single and Rush — are written to your browser's local storage on the device you played on. They are not sent anywhere, they do not follow you to another phone, and clearing site data clears them. There is no leaderboard to fall off.
What that means in practice is covered in Getting started.