Take-Off: How to Meet Every Fence on a Good Stride

Updated October 2026

Take-Off strips show jumping down to a single decision: how long each stride should be. The horse runs on its own, the fences come at you whether you are ready or not, and the only things under your thumbs are a Shorten button and a Lengthen button. That sounds simple until you realise that every press changes not just the next hoofbeat but every hoofbeat between you and the fence. This guide explains what the game is actually measuring, how the numbers behind each course change, and the habits that turn a nervous rider into one who meets every fence on a good spot.

What the game is really testing

A fence in Take-Off is jumped from the last footfall before it. If that footfall lands too far from the fence or too close to it, the rail falls. Nothing else matters: there is no timing button for the jump itself, no speed control and no steering. Your whole job is to make the strides add up so that the final one finishes inside the green band painted on the ground in front of the fence.

That makes Take-Off a planning game wearing an action game's clothes. Quick fingers help a little, but the riders who score well are the ones who read the distance early and make small, calm corrections while there is still plenty of ground to work with. The game rewards foresight much more than reflexes.

Reading the marker and the gauge

Two displays tell you where you are heading. On the track, a small triangle sits on the ground at the spot where you would take off if you stopped touching the buttons now, with the distance to the fence printed above it in metres. Below the track, a wider gauge shows the same thing at a larger scale, because the green band on the main view is only a few pixels wide on a phone. On the gauge the fence is at the right-hand end, and the further left the needle sits, the further from the fence you would leave the ground. Both the triangle and the gauge number turn green when the predicted take-off is inside the band.

The gauge also obeys the controls in a predictable direction. Shortening the stride squeezes an extra bit of ground into each step before the fence, so the last footfall ends up further back and the needle slides left. Lengthening does the opposite and pushes the needle right, towards the fence. Learn that mapping until it is automatic: needle too far right, press Shorten; needle too far left, press Lengthen.

One quirk is worth knowing. If you keep lengthening after the take-off point is almost touching the fence, the horse eventually needs one fewer stride, and the marker jumps back a whole stride length. This is not a bug; it is the arithmetic of whole strides. Most of the time you will not want to force that jump, but on a short approach it can occasionally be the cleaner fix.

The numbers behind each course

The code makes the difficulty curve very concrete. On the first course the horse gallops at 6.2 metres per second and gains 0.15 m/s with every course after that, with no upper limit. Each stride can be anything from 2.7 to 4.3 metres, and every course starts at 3.5. Holding a button changes the stride at 0.5 metres per second on the first course, a rate that drops by 0.012 per course until it bottoms out at 0.28.

The green band is centred 2.9 metres in front of the fence. On course one it runs from 2.3 to 3.5 metres, a generous 1.2 metres wide. It narrows by 3.6 centimetres per course until it reaches its minimum of 0.52 metres, from 2.64 to 3.16 metres, at about the twentieth course. The first course has five fences, every second course adds one more, and from course eleven on there are always ten. After each fence the horse lands three metres beyond it, and the next fence sits somewhere between 16 and 30 metres past that landing spot. The course generator checks that every gap can actually be ridden with legal stride lengths, so a bad distance is always fixable if you react in time.

Scoring and how many mistakes you can afford

Your score is simply the number of fences you clear cleanly, counted across every course you complete. A knocked rail earns nothing but does not subtract anything either. The three hearts in the top bar belong to the current course, not to the whole run: knock down three rails on the same course and the game is over, but finish a course with one or two faults and you start the next one with three fresh hearts.

That changes how you should think about risk. Two faults on a course are survivable, so an early rail is not a reason to panic and make wild corrections. Panic is exactly what produces the third rail. Treat each fence as its own small problem and remember that the counter resets once you reach the end of the course.

Why early corrections beat late ones

Suppose there are five strides left before a fence and the marker sits half a metre too close. Shortening each of those five strides by ten centimetres moves the final footfall back by half a metre, which is a tiny change to each step. Now imagine you wait until only one stride remains. You would need to shorten that last stride by the full half metre, and at a change rate of a few tenths of a metre per second you simply do not have enough time before the foot comes down. The same error that was trivial five strides out is impossible one stride out.

This is why the best moment to adjust is right after you land over the previous fence. You have the most strides ahead of you, every press has the most leverage, and the stride you leave behind after landing carries straight into the next approach. A rider who is always correcting at the last second is not unlucky; they are throwing away most of their leverage.

Common mistakes

• Overshooting. Each press moves the marker further than you expect when many strides remain. Use short taps when the needle is close to the green, and stop the moment it turns green.
• Waiting to see what happens. The marker never drifts by itself; if the stride is unchanged, the prediction is exact. If it is outside the band now, it will still be outside when you arrive.
• Pressing blind in the air. Holding a button during a jump still changes the stride, but the marker and gauge for the next fence only reappear after you land, so any press in the air is a guess. Use the flight to glance at the minimap at the top instead, and make your real correction on touchdown.
• Fighting the wrap. If the marker leaps a full stride after a long lengthening press, do not chase it back with an equally long press. Pause, read the new number, and make a small adjustment.

A practice plan

1. Ride a few courses without touching anything, just watching how the triangle and needle relate to the fences. You will see why doing nothing almost never works.
2. Next, make one correction per fence, immediately after landing, and nothing else. Notice how small a press is enough when the fence is far away.
3. Then add a second, tiny check a couple of strides out to fine-tune towards the middle of the band, not its edge.
4. From course ten onward, aim for the centre of the green rather than just inside it, since the band keeps shrinking while the speed keeps rising.

Once the land-then-adjust rhythm becomes a habit, long runs follow naturally. The later courses are faster and tighter, but the principle never changes: see the distance early, fix it gently, and let the horse do the rest.