A newspaper delivery arcade game. Ride your bike down the street, flick papers into the mailboxes with red flags as you pass, and dodge parked cars, potholes, dogs and bins while the ride keeps getting faster.
Drag anywhere on the street to steer the bike left and right — it moves by as much as your finger moves, so you never have to cover it. Tap the left or right half of the screen to throw a newspaper to that side. You can steer with one thumb and throw with the other.
Houses line both sides of the street. The ones that take the paper have a bright roof and a blue mailbox with a red flag at the edge of the lawn; grey houses have no mailbox and do not want a paper. A paper flies straight out sideways from where your bike is when you tap, so throw when a red-flag mailbox is level with your bike. A good throw drops the flag, shows a tick, and scores 10 points; every delivery in a row adds 5 more, up to 60 points a box. Riding past a subscriber without delivering breaks your streak.
You start with 10 papers and can carry up to 15. Paper bundles lie on the road now and then — ride over one for 5 more. With no papers left, taps do nothing until you pick up a bundle.
Parked cars sit along the kerb, and potholes, rubbish bins and dogs that trot back and forth turn up in the road. Hitting any of them costs one of your three hearts and your streak, and the bike blinks for a moment while it cannot be hit again. The street speeds up the further you ride and the obstacles come closer together, so every route ends sooner or later; when the last heart is gone, the card shows your score with how many papers you delivered and how many houses you missed.
On a keyboard, use the left and right arrow keys to steer and Z or X (or A or D) to throw left or right.
Ride close to the middle of the road. From the centre line a paper reaches either side's mailboxes in a fraction of a second, you have room to swerve both ways, and the parked cars along the kerb are never in your path. Drift toward a side only to pick up a bundle or slip past an obstacle, then come back.
Time the throw by the mailbox, not by the house. Each subscriber has a single blue box at the edge of its lawn, and the paper keeps the height your bike had at the moment you tapped. Watch the box come down the screen and tap as it lines up with your rider. Because the throw uses the exact moment of your tap rather than the last drawn frame, the timing feels the same on a slow phone and a fast one. Early on you have plenty of time; once the street speeds up, start your tap a touch earlier, as the box approaches the bike.
The streak is where the points are. The first delivery is worth 10, the second 15, and by the eleventh in a row each box is worth 60 — six times as much. Missing a house or crashing sends you back to 10, so it is usually better to skip a risky throw and keep riding cleanly than to swerve into a car chasing one mailbox. Papers are limited too: a wasted throw at a grey house or a mistimed toss costs you one, and an empty bag can break a streak just as surely as a crash.
Read the road a screen ahead. Parked cars only ever sit against the kerb, potholes and bins stay where they are, and dogs run back and forth across the road and turn at the edges, so watch which way a dog is heading before you commit to a gap. After a hit you blink for about a second and a half and cannot be hit again — use that moment to get back to the centre, not to grab a risky bundle.