A crane swings each new floor over your tower; tap to drop it so it lands on the floor below. Build as high as you can before three misses.
What is Tower Stack?
Tower Stack is a one-button stacking game in which a crane swings each new floor above your building and you drop it at the right moment so it lands on the floor below. The goal is to build as high as possible and score as many points as you can before you lose three floors.
It is a timing game. There is one action, the drop, and everything depends on when you make it. The swing gets wider as the tower grows, the tower starts to sway, and the points for landing floors dead centre add up much faster than the points for height alone.
How to play Tower Stack
Each floor hangs from the crane rope and swings from side to side above the tower. Tap, click, or press Space, Enter or the down arrow to release it. The floor drops straight down from the point where you let go, with no sideways drift.
What happens next depends on where its centre lands. If the centre of the falling floor is over the floor below, which means more than half of it is supported, it stays and the tower grows by one floor. If less than half of it is supported, it tips over the edge and falls. If it misses the tower completely, it drops past. A tipped or missed floor counts as a loss, and three losses end the game.
A floor that lands keeps its full width and stays where it landed. Floors are never trimmed. The next floor then has to land on that one, so an off-centre landing moves the target for the next drop.
Each floor scores 25 points. A landing within a small margin of the centre of the floor below is a Perfect, and Perfects in a row stack up: the first in a streak adds 25, the second adds 50, the third adds 75, and so on. A normal landing or a lost floor resets the streak.
Tower Stack tips: timing, sway and Perfect streaks
Learn the rhythm of the swing. The rope swings like a pendulum, slow at the ends and fastest in the middle. While your tower stands under the middle of the swing, that is where you want to drop, so release slightly before the floor gets there to allow for your reaction time. Watch two or three swings before the first drop of a new phase and tap on the beat.
Use the first floor. The very first floor hangs still on the rope, so it is a free landing. From the second floor on, the rope swings 30 degrees each way. At 10 floors the swing widens to 60 degrees and at 20 floors to 80, and the swing speed changes too, so expect to adjust your timing at those points.
Watch the tower as well as the rope. From 5 floors up, the whole tower sways, and the sway grows stronger at about 13 and 23 floors. Because the floor falls for a moment before it lands, the top of the tower can move while it falls. Aim for the spot where the top floor will be when your floor arrives.
Chase streaks. Ten normal floors score 250 points. Ten Perfects in a row score 1,625. Height still matters because every floor adds points, but a player who keeps a long streak going will beat a taller tower built with careless drops.
Do not panic after a bad landing. Since floors keep their full width, a landing near the edge does not shrink anything. Your next target simply moves. Keep in mind that the crane always swings around the middle of the screen, so if the top of your tower has drifted to one side, the right moment to drop is no longer the bottom of the swing. Watch where the floor passes over the new top and time your tap for that point.
Difficulty as the tower grows
Tower Stack has no levels or modes; difficulty rises with height. The swing angle grows at 10 and 20 floors, the tower begins to sway at 5 floors and sways more as it climbs, and the sky darkens as you build higher. You have three lost floors for the whole game, and they do not come back, so the hearts on screen are worth guarding.
Other stacking games cut off the overhanging part of each block or add bonus items. In this one, blocks keep their size, and the challenge comes only from timing, the widening swing and the sway.
Where tower stacking games come from
Stacking games with a swinging crane became a common type of casual game on mobile phones in the mid-2000s, because they fit a one-button control and short play sessions so well. The idea has since appeared in many browser and phone games.
Our Tower Stack is based on an open-source HTML5 tower game published under the MIT license by BMQB in 2018. We ported its rules by hand for Hevagames: the landing rule, the Perfect margin, the swing angles and speeds, the growing sway and the scoring. The graphics are drawn in code and the music and sounds were left out.
Play Tower Stack free on Hevagames
Tower Stack runs in the browser on phones, tablets and computers, with no download and no sign-up. On a phone you tap anywhere on the screen; on a computer you click or use the keyboard. The play area keeps a tall, portrait shape and scales to fit your screen.
You can pause with P, Esc or the pause button. Your best score is saved on your device. The game is silent, so it works well for a quick round anywhere, and it follows the light or dark theme of the site.
How to play
- 1A floor swings on the crane rope above the tower. Tap, click or press Space to drop it.
- 2If more than half of it lands on the floor below, it stays and the tower grows. If less than half does, it tips off; if it misses completely, it falls.
- 3Each floor scores 25 points. Landing close to the centre is a Perfect, and every Perfect in a row adds another 25.
- 4The swing gets wider at 10 and 20 floors, and from 5 floors up the tower itself starts to sway.
- 5Three floors lost and the game is over.
Controls
Tips
- Drop when the floor passes over the centre of the tower, not at the end of the swing.
- Watch the sway of the tower as well as the swing of the rope.
- A run of Perfects is worth far more than height alone.
