Wave Tips: Steering the Tunnel and Leading the Bends

Updated October 2026

Wave looks like a pure reflex test: a glowing dot, two neon walls, and a tunnel that keeps getting meaner. Underneath, it is a precise machine. Each run draws a fresh random course, the difficulty climbs on a known schedule that never stops, and the dot reacts to your finger in an exact, learnable way. This guide walks through what the code actually does and turns each rule into a habit you can practise.

How the dot answers your finger

The dot never moves left or right. It sits on a vertical line in from the left edge by 15 percent of the play area's height, which on an upright phone is a little over a quarter of the way across, and only its height changes. While you press anywhere on the play area, the height of your fingertip becomes the dot's target. The dot does not jump there; it closes the gap with exponential smoothing at a rate of 22 per second. In plain terms, it covers about two thirds of the remaining distance every 45 milliseconds and is roughly 90 percent of the way there after a tenth of a second. That small lag is the whole skill of the game: you are steering something that arrives a moment after you ask.

Lifting your finger does not freeze the dot. The target snaps to the vertical middle of the play area and the dot glides there at the same rate. The run begins on your first press, and the walls only kill you at the dot's own column: the game checks whether the dot's edge has crossed the top or bottom wall exactly where the dot is. Everything to the right of the dot is a preview, not a hazard.

Because the target is your finger's height and nothing else, there is no way to hold your finger above or below the dot and still steer it. What you can change is where along the width you press. Press near the left edge, behind the dot's column, and your thumb covers neither the dot nor the tunnel coming in from the right. Once you press, the game keeps following the finger even if it slides past the edge of the play area.

Everything is measured in screen heights

The game measures the whole world in heights of the play area: the dot's radius is 1.1 percent of the height, the tunnel's gap is a share of the height, the swing is a share of the height, and the scroll speed is in heights per second. A small phone and a tall one therefore play exactly the same tunnel, only drawn at a different size, and a score means the same thing on both. The walls always stay inside the play area. The numbers below quote pixels for a 640-pixel-tall play area, where they match the old pixel values.

The difficulty schedule, in numbers

Three things change with distance. Two of them never stop.

• Speed. Scrolling starts at about 0.31 heights per second (200 pixels per second on a 640-pixel area) and gains 0.018 heights per second for every height travelled until it reaches 0.81 heights per second (520 pixels). That takes about 53 seconds and a score of about 711. After that it keeps climbing, a third as steeply, with no ceiling.
• Gap. The tunnel starts with a half-height of 32 percent of the play area and narrows to 10 percent by a score of about 195. From there it keeps shrinking, more slowly, by 0.06 percent of the height for every height travelled. Around a score of 2,000 the half-gap is down to about 6 percent, and near 3,995 it becomes smaller than the dot itself, so no run can go past that point.
• Swing. The size of the tunnel's up-and-down motion starts at about 6 percent of the height and grows to a maximum of about 31 percent, reached at a score of about 295. This one stops, because a larger swing would push the walls off the screen.

The score itself is distance: 25.6 points for every play-area height scrolled, which is one point per 25 pixels on a 640-pixel area. At 0.81 heights per second that is almost 21 points per second, and it keeps rising, which is why scores accelerate so sharply once a run gets going. There is no plateau any more: every second past the 711 mark is faster and tighter than the one before.

The changes are tied to the position of each stretch of tunnel, not to how far you have got. The bend you see at the right edge already has the gap and the swing it will have when it reaches the dot, so what you see is what you will get.

A new tunnel every run

The centre line is the sum of three sine waves. At the start of every run the game picks each wave's length and starting offset at random, within a fixed range, so the course is different every time. There is no stretch to memorise. What stays the same is the character of the tunnel: the long wave sets the big climbs and dives, the middle one adds bends on top, and the short one adds a small ripple.

When the waves fall into step, they stack into steep climbs followed by steep drops, and those are the moments that end runs. Because they cannot be learned in advance, the useful skill is spotting them at the right edge of the screen: look for the walls heading steeply in one direction for a long stretch and start your move early.

Leading the dot instead of chasing it

The 45-millisecond lag is short, but at 0.81 heights per second the tunnel moves almost 4 percent of the height sideways in that time, and on a steep slope the wall can move a long way vertically while the dot is still catching up. The fix is to move your finger slightly before the tunnel asks for it. Keep your eyes on the patch of tunnel a short distance ahead of the dot and steer toward where the centre will be, not where it is now.

How much does that matter? We ran two bots over 20 random courses each. One always pressed exactly on the tunnel's centre beside the dot; it crashed after about 40 seconds, with a median score of about 480. The other added exactly enough lead to cancel the dot's lag; it lasted a median of 132 seconds and scored about 2,800, and it still crashed every single run as the gap closed in. Both did the same on a large and a small screen. The lesson is to anticipate a little, smoothly, and never jerk ahead of a bend.

Frame rate and short screens

The tunnel advances in small fixed steps of real time, so a slow phone does not slow the game down or speed it up. Your finger, however, is read once per frame, so a phone that draws fewer frames gives you slightly coarser control at high speed. In the same lead-bot test, a screen updating 30 times a second instead of 60 scored about a third less. If your device has a battery saver that lowers the frame rate, turn it off for serious runs.

On a short screen everything is drawn smaller, but nothing leaves the screen and the timing is identical. If your thumb does slide past the edge of the play area, keep holding: the game keeps tracking a held finger, while releasing sends the dot toward the middle.

When to let go

Releasing is a real move, not just a rest. The dot always drifts to the exact vertical middle, so if the tunnel's centre happens to pass close to the middle of the screen, letting go for a moment parks the dot there more accurately than most thumbs can. The swing is centred on the middle of the play area, so the tunnel crosses that line again and again. The risk is timing: the release only helps if the tunnel will still be around the middle by the time the dot settles, roughly a tenth of a second later. In a steep section, letting go is almost always a mistake.

Avoid quick taps during a run. Each lift and press sends the target to the middle and back, which yanks the dot around. A single steady press, held from start to crash, gives the smoothest control.

A practice routine

1. Play five runs pressing near the left edge of the play area. Get used to steering without your thumb near the dot or over the incoming tunnel.
2. Watch only the right edge of the screen for a whole run and call out each steep stretch before it reaches the dot. Spotting them early is the skill that replaces memorising.
3. Practise the 195 to 300 stretch, where the gap has just reached 10 percent and the swing is still growing. This is where most runs die.
4. Past 711 the tunnel never stops speeding up or closing in. Keep the lead small and steady, and treat each extra hundred points as a real gain.

Your best score is kept on your device, and any score above zero can be sent to the Hall of Fame from the crash card. The board started fresh when the random courses and the endless difficulty arrived, so older scores from the fixed course are not mixed in.