Bottle Toss Tips: Throw Power, Spin and the Full-Turn Bonus

Updated October 2026

In Bottle Toss you throw a small bottle from one platform to another, and every throw is a single drag of your finger. Landing on the target platform earns a point; landing it standing up on its base earns three. Miss once and the run is over. The game feels like a matter of touch, but the rules behind it are simple and consistent, and once you know how the drag turns into speed and spin, you can pick throws on purpose instead of hoping. This guide explains the throwing controls, what counts as a landing, how to find the full-turn throw that earns the bonus, and how the distance and the platform change as you score.

How a throw is made

Start your touch on or near the bottle, or anywhere in the lower half of the board. Then slide your finger toward where you want the bottle to go and let go. Two things are read at the moment you release: the direction from the centre of the bottle to your fingertip, and the distance between them. The direction is the launch direction, so to throw up and to the right you finish with your finger up and to the right of the bottle. The distance sets the power, and reaching 140 pixels from the bottle's centre is full power; anything further adds nothing.

Some releases are ignored rather than thrown. If your fingertip ends less than 18 pixels from the bottle's centre, or level with or below it, nothing happens and you can simply try again. That makes the minimum power about 13 percent of the maximum. While you drag, a dashed arrow shows the launch direction, and it grows longer as power increases. It shows where the bottle starts heading, not the curve it will follow.

Speed and spin are tied together

Power controls two things at once. The bottle leaves at a speed between 380 and 1,000 pixels per second, and it spins at a rate between 6 and 16 radians per second, which is roughly one turn per second at the low end and two and a half at the top. The spin is always clockwise and you cannot control it separately. Gravity then pulls the bottle down along a normal arc, while the spin continues at a constant rate until it touches down.

This link is the heart of the game. A gentle throw spins slowly and flies a short time; a hard throw spins fast and flies further. For a given distance there are usually several combinations of angle and power that reach the platform, and each one arrives at a different point in its rotation. Choosing your throw means choosing which rotation you want to arrive with.

What counts as a landing

The target platform starts 70 pixels wide, and the catch zone extends 4 pixels past each end, so the bottle's centre has a 78-pixel window. The bottle has to come down onto the top: the landing is judged at the exact moment its base crosses the level of the platform's surface on the way down, and the centre must be inside the window at that moment. A bottle that drops past the edge first and then drifts sideways into the platform is not caught; it falls. Any orientation counts: a bottle that lands on its side still scores one point and is laid flat.

The bonus is for a true upright landing only. If the bottle is within 20 degrees of standing on its base, cap up, when it touches down, you earn a 2-point bonus, for 3 points in total, and the game stands it upright. A bottle that arrives cap-down after half a turn is caught and left standing on its cap, but it scores just the single landing point. Half turns are the easy ones to produce by accident, so do not mistake them for progress: the bonus needs a full rotation.

The starting platform does not catch the bottle. If you under-throw, the bottle falls past the gap and off the bottom of the screen, which ends the run. Throwing too far ends it the same way.

Finding the full-turn throw

To arrive upright, the time in the air multiplied by the spin rate needs to be one whole rotation. Even the gentlest throw spins at about one turn per second, so a full turn needs a long flight, and long flights come from high arcs. In our simulation of the game's physics, with the target at a medium distance, the bonus came from a short-to-medium drag of about 35 to 45 pixels launched steeply, around 55 to 70 degrees above horizontal, for roughly 0.7 seconds in the air. For the farthest targets the same family of throws worked with a slightly firmer drag of 40 to 50 pixels at 45 to 60 degrees. Much harder drags only reach a full turn when thrown almost straight up, and those windows are a few degrees wide. Overall only about one throw in eighty, picked at random, lands upright, so this is the shot to practise.

You do not need to measure any of this. The practical method is the same as practising a free throw: pick one drag length that feels natural, keep it constant, and adjust only your angle until you see the bottle arrive vertical. Once you know how that one throw behaves, you can lengthen it slightly for distant platforms. Changing both angle and power at once makes it almost impossible to learn from a miss.

How the distance changes

The distance to the next platform is chosen at random for every throw. It always lies between roughly 30 percent of the board width and the far right edge. As your score climbs, the shortest possible distance creeps toward the far end, and from a score of 10 onward the lower limit stays at 60 percent of that range. In other words, the first few throws can be short, while later ones are mostly medium to long, but each new target is still a fresh random choice rather than a fixed step further away.

The platform itself also shrinks. For your first seven landings every target is 70 pixels wide. From the eighth landing on, each landing makes the next platform 2.5 pixels narrower, with no lower limit. After 27 landings the next platform is narrower than the bottle's base and turns red: nothing can stand on it, so every run ends there at the latest. A run of 27 landings is worth between 27 and 81 points depending on how many were upright.

After a landing there is a short pause of about a second. Then the platform you landed on becomes your new starting point, unless it is past 60 percent of the board width, in which case the bottle returns to the starting position on the left. Because of this, you sometimes throw from the middle of the board to a target close by, and sometimes from the far left across most of the screen. Look at the gap before deciding your throw, every time.

Common mistakes

• Overpowering short gaps. A hard throw to a near platform spins too fast and arrives sideways, or overshoots it entirely.
• Releasing below the bottle. If your fingertip ends level with or below the bottle's centre, the throw is cancelled. Finish your drag clearly above it.
• Aiming at the near edge. The catch window is only 78 pixels wide at the start, and it narrows after the seventh landing. Aim for the middle of the platform so a small error in either direction still lands.
• Settling for half turns. A cap-down landing is caught but scores only one point. The bonus needs a full rotation onto the base.

A practice plan

1. Play a few runs just to land, accepting one point per throw. Learn how far a short, medium and long drag sends the bottle.
2. Pick your favourite short drag and experiment with a steep angle until you can produce cap-up landings on purpose.
3. Learn one adjustment for long gaps: a longer drag at a flatter angle.
4. Then play for consistency. Since each landing scores either one or three, a long run of safe throws is usually worth more than a few risky attempts at the bonus.

Your best score is stored on your device, and any run above zero can be saved to the Hall of Fame from the end card.