What are the medals in Flappy Bird?

Bronze at 10 pipes, silver at 20, gold at 30 and platinum at 40, on any difficulty. They are awarded on the game-over card and stored with your best score.

Does Flappy Bird work on a phone?

Yes. Tap anywhere on the game to flap. The play area scales to your screen, and the whole game is a single HTML file so it loads quickly on mobile data.

Flappy Bird — Free Online, Daily Challenge & Three Difficulties

Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird is the purest one-button game there is: tap to flap, do nothing to fall, and thread a bird through an endless run of pipes. This is a free browser homage to the 2013 mobile original, built as a single HTML file with no signup and no install. It adds three gap sizes, a seeded daily run that is identical for every player, medals, and a best-score memory in your browser.

How to play

Tap, click, or press Space, ↑ or W to flap. Each flap gives the same upward kick.
Pass between the pipes. Every pipe you clear scores one point.
Touching a pipe or the ground ends the run. The ceiling only stops you.
P pauses, R restarts. The game pauses itself if you switch tabs.

The three difficulties

Mode	Gap height	Scroll speed	Pipe spacing	Feel
Easy	180 px	140 px/s	240 px	Room to recover from a late tap. Good for learning the rhythm.
Normal	150 px	160 px/s	220 px	Close to the original. The daily run uses these numbers.
Hard	122 px	185 px/s	200 px	The gap is under five bird-heights, and it moves further between pipes.

In every mode the speed creeps up by 0.4% per point, capped at +24% after 60 pipes, and the bird's hit circle is 10 px against a drawn radius of 13 px, so a graze that looks like contact is usually forgiven.

The physics under the hood

The bird is a point mass under constant gravity, integrated 120 times a second. Between taps its height follows the school textbook parabola y(t) = y₀ + v₀t + ½gt², with g = 1,900 px/s². The part that makes the game feel unfair is the flap: it does not add lift, it sets the vertical velocity to −540 px/s regardless of how fast you were falling. Two consequences follow directly from that.

Every flap peaks at exactly the same height above the tap point: v₀² / 2g = 540² / 3,800 ≈ 77 px, reached 0.28 s after the tap. Rapid tapping does not make you climb faster, it just keeps resetting the clock.
A tap that comes 0.1 s late leaves the bird 10 px lower than it would have been, plus the extra speed gravity has added. With a 150 px gap that tenth of a second is a large fraction of your margin, which is why the game rewards a steady rhythm over reaction.

At Normal speed a 58 px pipe takes 0.36 s to cross the bird, so a pipe you have entered safely is nearly always a pipe you clear. Almost every death happens at the leading edge, from arriving too high or too low, not from drifting while inside the gap.

The daily run

Choose ★ Daily and the game seeds its random number generator from the UTC date. Every player who plays the daily on the same day sees the same pipe heights in the same order, on Normal settings. Your best run for the day is stored in your browser, and Share copies a spoiler-free line with the date and your pipe count so you can compare with friends without giving the layout away. A new board arrives at midnight UTC.

Medals

Medal	Pipes
Bronze	10
Silver	20
Gold	30
Platinum	40

Tips that actually help

Tap on a metronome, not on fear. A flap every ~0.55 s holds the bird level. Adjust the beat early to change altitude rather than double-tapping at the last moment.
Aim for the centre of the gap, then stop steering. The bird only needs to be inside the gap at the leading edge.
Read the next pipe while passing this one. The layout is visible 220 px ahead, which is about 1.4 s at Normal speed. That is your planning window.
Descend by waiting, climb by flapping. A single skipped beat drops you about 60 px. Two flaps in quick succession gain you almost nothing because the second one just resets the first.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Flappy Bird so hard?

Because you cannot control how much lift you get, only when. Every tap produces the same 77 px climb, so the game is a pure timing test with a 150 px window and no way to correct mid-gap.

Is the daily challenge the same for everyone?

Yes. The pipe sequence comes from a random number generator seeded with the UTC date, so it is identical for everyone that day. Your best of the day is saved locally and the share line lets you compare without spoilers.

What happened to the original Flappy Bird?

The original was released for mobile in 2013 by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen and became one of the world's most-downloaded games in early 2014. Nguyen pulled it from the app stores in February 2014, saying it had become too addictive. This page is an independent free homage, not the original app.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Tap anywhere on the game to flap. The play area scales to your screen and the whole game is one HTML file, so it loads fast on mobile data.

Is my best score saved?

Per difficulty and per daily date, in your browser's local storage. Nothing is sent to a server, so it will not follow you between devices.

Related games

2048 — the other five-second-to-learn game that eats an afternoon.
Minesweeper — pure logic where Flappy Bird is pure timing.
Cliffwalkers — a puzzle platformer where the little folk do the walking.
Hellcat — flight with actual aerodynamics, if the bird has left you wanting a proper wing.

FLAPPY BIRD