How to play
Tap to drop the sliding block on top of the tower.
About Tower Stack
Tower Stack is a one-tap game about building as high as you can. A block slides from side to side above your tower. Tap, and it drops. Whatever overhangs the block beneath is sliced off, and the next block is only as wide as the part that landed. Sloppy drops make thin towers, and thin towers do not last.
How to play
There is a single control: tap or click to drop the moving block. It lands on top of the tower exactly where it was when you tapped.
If it lines up perfectly with the block below, nothing is lost. If it hangs over one side, the overhang is cut away, and every block from then on is that much narrower. Miss the tower completely and the game ends. Your score is the height, counted in blocks, and a tap starts a new tower.
As the tower grows, the view moves up with it, so the block you are aiming at stays in roughly the same part of the screen.
Why it gets difficult
Two things work against you at once. The block shrinks with every imperfect drop, and it can never grow back. And the slider speeds up with every block you place. By the time you have stacked twenty, the block is moving at more than twice its starting speed, and you may be trying to land it on a platform a few pixels wide.
That combination is what makes the game tick. The first ten blocks decide how the last ten go. A tower built from wide, careful early drops gives you room for error later. One that lost half its width in the first five blocks is living on borrowed time.
Timing tips
Watch the tower, not the moving block. Fix your eyes on the top block and its edges, and let the slider come into view. You are judging the moment when two edges line up, and that is easier when one of them is standing still.
Pick an edge. Decide to match left edge to left edge, or right to right, and stick with it. Trying to judge both sides at once gives you two things to watch and half the accuracy.
Tap slightly early. There is a small delay between deciding to tap and the tap happening, and at speed the block travels a long way in that time. If your blocks keep overhanging on the far side, you are tapping late.
Use the rhythm. The block bounces between the edges of the screen at a steady pace. After a couple of passes you can feel the beat and tap on it, instead of reacting by eye every time. When the speed steps up after each drop, give it one pass to learn the new tempo if you need to.
Do not rush. Nothing forces you to drop on the first pass. Letting the block go by once or twice is free.
Scores
Ten blocks is a solid start. Twenty takes steady hands. Thirty or more means your timing is excellent, and your tower is probably a sliver.
A tidy little challenge
Tower Stack takes seconds to understand and works beautifully on a phone with one thumb. Games are short, the colours change with every layer, and there is always the feeling that a slightly better start would have changed everything.
It runs free in your browser on any device, with no download.