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Archery Tips: Leading the Target and Aiming at the Turnaround

Updated October 2026

Archery gives you ten arrows and a single moving target, and the best possible total is 100. There is no wind, no gravity and no clock, which means every point you drop comes from just two things: the angle of the shot and the moment you let go. This guide explains exactly how the shot, the target and the scoring bands work in the game code, and then turns that into a repeatable method for collecting more of the gold.

How a shot really flies

You can start a draw anywhere on the play area. Wherever your finger lands, the arrow always leaves from the bow on the left, at the vertical middle of the field. What matters is the direction and length of your drag: the arrow flies the opposite way, like a slingshot, and the dashed yellow guide drawn from the bow shows that line exactly.

Three details are worth knowing:

Pulling further only changes speed. A pull of 140 pixels or more is full power, which launches the arrow at 1,100 pixels per second. The weakest accepted shot travels at 400. Because there is no drop, a weak shot still reaches the target. It just gets there later, and that delay is the whole story of this game.

The target and the scoring bands

The target is a narrow vertical bar, 18 pixels wide, on the right side of the field. It slides up and down at a constant speed and flips direction instantly when it reaches either end of its track, which sits 35 percent of the field height above and below the middle. It does not ease in or slow down near the ends.

Only height decides your score. The game measures how far the arrow tip lands from the target's centre line, as a fraction of half the target's height:

The coloured stripes on the bar are drawn at exactly those boundaries, so what you see is what you score. A shot that passes above or below the bar is a miss and scores nothing. The bar starts 90 pixels tall, which makes the gold band only about 13 pixels from edge to edge.

Difficulty only rises when you hit

Every hit, whatever band it lands in, makes the target 4 pixels shorter and 22 pixels per second faster. A miss changes nothing. Over ten arrows, the last shot after nine hits faces a 54-pixel bar moving at 258 pixels per second, with a gold band roughly 8 pixels tall. Every game starts the target at 60 pixels per second, but at a random height and heading, so even the first shot has to be read fresh.

Could you miss on purpose to keep the target easy? A deliberate miss throws away at least 4 certain points in exchange for a smaller, uncertain saving on later arrows, so in practice it is a poor trade. Take every hit you can and get better at the fast target instead.

Use full power and lead the target

Because the target keeps moving while the arrow is in the air, you are always aiming at where the bar will be, not where it is. The faster the arrow, the smaller that guess. On a 390 by 844 phone screen, the play area we measured was 358 pixels wide, which puts about 272 pixels between bow and target. From those numbers:

At the first target speed, a quarter of a second means the bar moves around 15 pixels during the flight. By the tenth arrow it moves about 64 pixels, more than the whole height of the bar. Aiming straight at the current position will simply miss late in the game. Pull a long, full draw every time, so that the flight time is short and consistent, and you only ever have to learn one amount of lead.

Aim at the turnaround, not the middle

The target does not slow at the ends of its track, yet the ends are still the best place to shoot. The reason is geometry. If you aim a few pixels inside one end, the bar passes your aim point on the way out, flips, and passes it again moments later on the way back. Those two passes merge into one long scoring window, roughly double the time you get when the bar crosses the middle once at full speed.

We checked this in our simulation, assuming a perfectly judged angle and a random release timing error of about 60 milliseconds. On the first arrow both methods scored close to 10. After four hits, shooting at the middle averaged about 8.7 per arrow while aiming just inside the turnaround averaged about 9.5. After nine hits the gap grew to about 6.6 against 8.0. The faster the target, the more the turnaround helps.

To set it up, draw your bow early and hold the angle on the end point. As the bar heads toward that end, release roughly one flight time before it arrives, which is about a third of a second at full power. Early in a game the bar is slow: a full sweep from one end to the other takes about 7.7 seconds on the screen above, so you may wait a while. There is no time limit, so waiting is free.

A steady routine for ten arrows

  1. Watch one sweep. Before drawing, follow the bar from one end to the other so you feel its current speed.
  2. Pick an end and hold the angle. Drag until the guide line points just inside the end of the track, with the draw at full length.
  3. Release on the approach. Let go while the bar is still travelling toward that end, about one flight time early.
  4. Reset after every hit. The bar is faster now, so the release point moves earlier. Watch a sweep again before the next arrow.

If you need to abandon a run, pressing New with points on the board ends the game first and shows the result card, so a strong partial score can still be saved. Your best total is stored on your device, and any score above zero can go to the Hall of Fame.

Common mistakes

The most common error is a short, soft pull. It feels more controlled, but the slow arrow needs a much bigger lead, and the lead changes with every hit. The second is chasing the bar through the middle of its track with quick, reactive releases. The third is rushing the final arrows because the bar looks frantic. The target never speeds up while you wait, and the turnaround is exactly where you want to be, so take your time on the shots that are worth the most.

▶ Play Archery Pull, release and chase the gold across ten arrows.