Tipping Press
A press beam pivots on a single point. Ink tins, books and type cases fall from the rafters — aim each one and drop it where it will hold the beam level. Tip too far and everything slides toward the low end and off into the floor. Three slips and the shift is over.
How to play
The beam turns freely around the centre pin. Every weight you place pushes it down on that side, and the further out you place it, the harder it pushes — a light ink tin at the far end out-torques a heavy type case near the middle. Move your finger or mouse across the stage to line up the guide, then release (or press Space) to drop. You can't stall: the bar under the held piece counts down, and when it empties the weight drops on its own wherever the guide happens to be.
Once the beam leans past about 20° the weights break loose and start sliding downhill, and anything that runs off the end costs a life. Keep the beam inside the green band (±5°) to earn a steady balance bonus. Later drops get heavier, the beam gets twitchier, and the weights come down faster.
The beam is a lever, not a scale
A kitchen scale asks one question: how much does this weigh? A lever asks two, and the second matters more. The beam here turns freely on a single pin, and it responds not to the weight on it but to that weight multiplied by how far out it sits. Move an object twice as far from the pin and it pushes twice as hard. Put it directly over the pin and it does nothing at all.
- Pivot
- The pin the beam turns on, dead centre of the stage. Distances are measured from here, and the two arms are 170 pixels each.
- Moment arm
- How far a load sits from the pivot, measured along the beam. Nothing about the object changes when you move it — only its leverage does.
- Torque
- Turning effort: mass times moment arm times gravity. The beam adds up the torque from everything on it and rotates toward whichever side is winning.
The rule the game runs is one line of arithmetic. Every object contributes mass times distance times gravity, positive on the right and negative on the left, and against that sits a restoring pull of 950,000 units times the sine of the current lean — the beam's own weight hanging under the pin. It settles where the two balance: the tangent of the resting angle equals the net load torque divided by 950,000. Everything below follows from that.
Worked example: why the tin beats the type case
An ink tin has a mass of 1.0 in the game's units and a type case 2.1 — the case is more than twice the tin. The aim guide lets you place a tin as far out as 157 pixels, so a tin at the very tip carries a moment of 1.0 × 157 = 157. The type case dropped 40 pixels from the pin carries 2.1 × 40 = 84. The lighter object wins by nearly two to one, and the beam leans toward the tin.
Turn that around and it becomes a number worth memorising: a type case has to sit further than about 75 pixels from the pin — a little under half an arm — before it matches a single ink tin parked at the end. Anything you place in the inner third of the beam is almost decoration. The corollary is that the ends are where you can lose control fastest, and also the only place you can make a real correction.
The load that breaks the beam loose is a fixed figure too. Friction gives up at a lean of 19.8 degrees, and the beam reaches that once the net mass-times-distance on one side passes about 380 — call it two and a half ink tins stacked at the far end. A single opening tin at the tip settles around eight and a half degrees, which is why the first drop never kills you.
Rescuing a beam that has already gone over
Past 19.8 degrees the objects stop being anchors and become cargo. The sliding is what makes the situation run away: every pixel a weight travels outward lengthens its moment arm, which increases the lean, which speeds up the slide. Worse, the friction that catches them is weaker than the friction that held them — a sliding object keeps accelerating until the beam is back under about 16.7 degrees. That leaves a band of roughly three degrees in which nothing you do stops the slide.
The one lever you have is the next drop, and it works twice: its standing torque pushes the high side down, and its impact adds a separate one-off kick to the beam's rotation, proportional to falling speed times distance from the pin. Falling speed climbs from 120 to 320 pixels per second over a shift, so later drops hit harder — a liability when you are level, an asset when you are catching a lean. Aim as far out on the high side as the guide allows, and note that the guide narrows as the beam tilts: it only covers the beam's current horizontal span.
What does not work is dropping onto something that is already there. A piece landing within half the combined widths of a neighbour never settles — it catches a corner, takes a quarter of its impact speed sideways and rolls downhill. Stacking on the pin, the obvious way to cheat a balance game, is precisely the move the simulation refuses.
What counts as a slip
Three lives, and three separate ways to spend one, all treated identically: a weight that slides past the 170-pixel end of the beam and falls, a drop that lands beyond the end rather than on it, and a drop that misses the beam entirely and falls past the bottom of the stage. Nothing else costs you anything — a violent lean is survivable, a lost piece is not. Note also that you cannot wait out a bad situation. If you hold a piece too long it drops on its own, and the fuse shortens from four seconds at the start of the shift to two seconds later on, so a leaning beam has to be answered rather than watched.
The drop order, the difficulty ramp and every constant above are fixed and identical for each player. The only thing that ever leaves the page is a leaderboard entry, and only if you make one: typing a name and pressing Post at the end of a shift writes a single record holding the game id, that name, your score and a server timestamp, and keeps the name in your browser for next time. Decline and nothing is sent; if the leaderboard fails to load, only the board goes offline.
Frequently asked questions
How do you play Tipping Press?
Drag across the stage to move the drop guide, then release — or press Space — to drop the next weight onto the beam. Place each object so the beam stays as level as you can. If the beam leans far enough the objects slide downhill, and anything that slides off the end costs you one of your three lives.
Why does a light object sometimes tip the beam more than a heavy one?
Because the beam responds to torque, which is mass multiplied by distance from the pivot. A light ink tin dropped right at the tip has a long lever arm and can out-push a much heavier type case sitting close to the centre pin. Placing heavy things near the middle and using light things to trim the far ends is the core strategy.
How is the score calculated?
You earn 100 points for every object that lands and stays on the beam, 10 points per second while the beam is held within 5° of level, and 1 point per second of survival. The final score is a whole number and can be posted to a casual global leaderboard.
Does it get harder as you go?
Yes, on a fixed curve that is the same for every player — no randomness. Objects get up to about 2.2× heavier over the first 34 drops, the beam's own rotational inertia drops by roughly 45% so it reacts faster, and the falling speed climbs from 120 to 320 pixels per second. All three ramp gently and then stop at a cap, so it stays playable.