Flipside Tips: Flip Timing, Crossing Time and the Speed Curve

Updated October 2026

Flipside gives you a single control, a tap that reverses gravity, and a corridor of pillars that rise from the floor and hang from the ceiling. The difficulty does not come from the control, which could hardly be simpler. It comes from the fact that your runner needs time to cross the corridor, and that time does not shrink while the pillars arrive faster and faster. This guide puts numbers on both sides of that race, explains what the game does and does not punish, and turns it into a short list of habits.

The playfield in proportions

Everything in Flipside is measured as a share of the playfield, so the game plays the same on a small phone and a large one. The field is a wide rectangle, about 1.3 times as wide as it is tall, up to 460 pixels across; on a 390-pixel phone it measured 357 by 279 pixels in our test. Your runner is a ball fixed at 28 percent of the way across, and only the world moves.

Pillars come from the floor or the ceiling with even odds, chosen independently for each one. A pillar is between 8.5 and 13.5 percent of the field's width, and it reaches between 34 and 46 percent of the field's height. The distance from one pillar's front edge to the next is between 40 and 60 percent of the width. Two facts follow from those ranges. Pillars never overlap each other, so there is never a pinch between a floor pillar and a ceiling pillar at the same moment. And no pillar is taller than half the field, so the side opposite a pillar always has plenty of room.

You score one point as each pillar's back edge passes behind the runner. The floor and the ceiling themselves are completely safe: touching them simply stops your vertical movement. Only the pillars end a run.

One practical point about the controls: a touch anywhere in the game area counts, not just on the playfield itself. On a tall phone the field sits in the middle of the game area with empty space above and below it, and you can rest your thumb in that space so it never hides the pillars.

How a flip really moves you

A tap reverses the direction of gravity; it does not give you a push. The pull is strong, six times the field's height per second squared, and your runner starts each flip from rest because landing on a surface stops it dead. By our calculation that means a full crossing from floor to ceiling takes about 0.55 seconds.

The crossing is slow at first and fast at the end. Half of the journey takes about 0.39 seconds and the second half only 0.16, because you are accelerating the whole way. You do not always need the full crossing, though. To clear a floor pillar you only have to rise above its top, and since pillars reach at most 46 percent of the height, getting out of the way of even the tallest one from the floor takes about 0.39 seconds, and about 0.34 seconds for the shortest.

A second tap mid-flight does not cancel the first instantly. It reverses gravity again, so you keep travelling in the same direction while you slow down, then drift back. Two quick taps produce a small hop that returns you to where you started. That is harmless on an empty stretch and fatal if a pillar is waiting there, so avoid nervous double taps.

The speed curve

The world starts by scrolling at 0.42 field heights per second and gains another 0.02 field heights per second for every second you survive, with no upper limit. After 10 seconds the scroll is about 0.62, after 30 seconds about 1.02 and after a minute about 1.62 field heights per second.

Your crossing time, meanwhile, never changes. By our calculation, at the starting speed the clear stretch between the back of one pillar and the front of the next lasts about a second on average and never less than about 0.6 seconds, comfortably more than the 0.34 to 0.39 seconds you need to get out of the way of a pillar on the other side. As the scroll accelerates, the shortest stretches drop below that, first only for rare combinations of a close, wide, tall pillar on the opposite side, then more and more often. Pillars on alternating sides become the real test. In our simulation, an automatic player that always flipped away from the next pillar as soon as the previous one had passed survived a median of about 28 seconds and scored a median of 29. You can beat that by flipping earlier and more selectively than such a simple rule does, but the curve guarantees that every run ends eventually.

Plan two pillars ahead

Because pillars never overlap, the whole game reduces to one question at a time: which side is the next pillar on, and am I on the other side? If the answer is yes, do nothing. Many runs are lost to unnecessary flips; staying put is often the strongest move.

• Same side twice: if the next two pillars are both on the floor, stay on the ceiling for both. One flip saved is half a second of safety earned.
• Alternating sides: start the flip as soon as your runner has cleared the back edge of the current pillar. Every frame you wait is taken from the gap you need to cross.
• Short pillars: a pillar at the low end of the range, around a third of the height, can be cleared by a runner that is only part of the way across. If you are mid-flip when one arrives, you may already be safe.

Remember that the collision box of the runner is the square around the ball, not the round shape you see. Give pillar corners a little more room than the drawing suggests.

Reading the screen

Pillars from the floor are drawn in green and pillars from the ceiling in orange, so you can tell them apart at a glance even when they are still near the right edge. A small arrow above or below the runner points the way gravity is currently pulling, which is handy after a quick series of taps when you may have lost count.

Your runner sits a little over a quarter of the way across, which leaves almost three quarters of the field visible ahead. Use that space. Look at the right half of the screen rather than at the ball, decide where you need to be for the next pillar, and let the timing come from that plan.

Common mistakes

• Flipping on sight. Seeing a pillar is not a reason to flip; being on its side is.
• Late starts on alternating pillars. The crossing is slow at the beginning, so a late start loses more than it seems.
• Double taps. They put you back where you were, usually at the worst moment.
• Watching the ball. The ball always looks fine until the moment it is not. Watch what is coming.

A practice plan

1. Play a few runs where you only flip when the next pillar is on your side. Count how many flips you avoided.
2. Practise alternating pillars by starting each flip the moment the previous pillar is behind you.
3. Once you regularly pass 30 seconds, work on the moments when you are mid-flight and a short pillar arrives: learn which ones you can already clear.

Your best score is saved on this device, and from the game-over card you can send any score above zero to the Hall of Fame.