Flappy Bat
Flappy Bat: how to play and fly farther
Flappy Bat is a one-tap Halloween game. A little bat hovers in front of a full moon, and every tap makes it flap its wings. Your job is to keep it in the air and guide it through the gaps between gravestones and haunted trees. This free version runs in your browser on phones and computers, remembers your best score, and grows a little harder the farther you fly. This guide explains the rules, the controls and the habits that help you clear more gaps.
What the game is and how the rules work
The bat flies forward on its own; you only control its height. Each flap gives it a quick push upward, and gravity pulls it back down straight away. Tap too often and it rises too high, tap too little and it sinks. The whole game is about finding the rhythm between those two.
Pillars come toward you from the right: a twisted tree hangs from the top of the screen and a gravestone or another tree rises from the ground. Between them is a gap. Fly through it and you earn a point. Touch a pillar or the ground and the flight ends. The sky above is closed, so flapping straight up only bumps the bat against the top of the screen.
Controls and how to start
After you press the start button, the bat waits in the air, bobbing gently, until your first tap. Nothing moves until then, so you can get comfortable first. There is only one action in the game, and it works the same way on every device.
The game pauses by itself if you switch to another tab or app, and you can pause it whenever you like, so a message or a phone call never ruins a good flight.
- On a phone or tablet, tap anywhere on the game area to flap.
- With a mouse, click the game area.
- With a keyboard, press Space, Enter, the up arrow or W.
- Press P or Escape, or the pause button, to pause, and Resume to carry on.
How scoring and difficulty work
You score one point for each gap the bat flies all the way through. The end screen shows your score, how many times you flapped and how long you stayed in the air. Your best score is saved in this browser, so you always have a number to beat.
The game gets harder gently. Every few gaps the openings become slightly narrower and the scenery moves slightly faster, but both stop changing at a fixed limit. The next gap is never placed impossibly far above or below the last one, so every gap can be flown through. The bat is also judged fairly: its collision area is a little smaller than the drawing, so a wingtip brushing a branch does not count as a crash.
Tips for flying farther
Aim for the lower half of each gap. A flap lifts the bat quickly, so if you wait just below the middle of an opening, one tap carries it safely through instead of into the top branch. Flying near the bottom of the gap and flapping as you arrive is the most reliable pattern.
Use short, light taps rather than bursts. Two or three quick taps in a row send the bat shooting upward, which is the most common way to crash into a hanging tree. Tap once, watch it fall a little, then tap again. Keep your eyes on the next gap, not on the bat itself, and start moving toward it as soon as you pass the current pillar.
When a high gap follows a low one, start climbing early with steady single taps. When a low gap follows a high one, simply let the bat fall and catch it with one tap at the right height. Stay relaxed: a tense hand taps late, and the rhythm matters more than speed.
A short history of flappy games
One-button flying games are older than smartphones, but the style became famous worldwide in early 2014 with Flappy Bird, a tiny mobile game made by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen. Its simple rule, tap to flap through gaps between pipes, and its tough difficulty made it a viral hit, and its creator removed it from app stores at the height of its popularity. Countless remakes and spin-offs followed.
Bats are a natural fit for Halloween. They fly at night, they appear in old legends about vampires, and they have decorated autumn celebrations for more than a century. Flappy Bat swaps the bird and the pipes for a cheerful bat, a moonlit graveyard and spooky trees, while keeping the one-tap idea that makes the genre so easy to start and hard to put down.
Fair play, sharing and privacy
The game runs at a fixed internal speed, so a slow phone or a busy computer does not change how the bat moves. When a flight ends, only your score is sent anonymously to our server so the end screen can show how you compare with other players, and that comparison appears only when there are real scores to compare with.
Share your result with friends from the end screen and challenge them to fly farther. It is a quick, friendly contest for a Halloween party, a break at school or work, or a few minutes on the bus.