Paper Plane

What Is Paper Plane?

Paper Plane is a throwing game built on an honest little flight model. You fold one of three planes, set the angle you want to launch at, set how hard you are going to throw it, and then you watch. The plane climbs, slows, turns over and comes down, and the only thing you control from that point is how well you read what it did.

A round is three throws. The wind is rolled fresh at the start of the round and stays put for all three, so the round is a single puzzle rather than three separate ones: one air, one answer, three attempts at it. Your best throw of the round is the score, and after each throw the game draws your best attempt so far as a ghost line on the field, so the next throw is always an argument with the last one.

How to Play

1. Pick a fold with 1, 2 or 3, or by tapping the fold strip above the field. The dart, the glider and the wide fold are genuinely different aircraft, not three difficulty settings.
2. Watch the angle dial. It sweeps continuously from -25° to +35° and it does not wait for you. Flat throws score well and steep ones do not, but "flat" here means slightly nose-down, not level, so the best answer is below the middle of the dial.
3. Lock the angle with Space when the needle is where you want it. If you never lock it, the game locks it for you when the sweep runs out, which is the game being kind and not the game being on your side.
4. Watch the power meter. It is a second, faster sweep. More is better on this one, and a hard throw beats a soft throw almost every time, but the meter does not stop for you either.
5. Lock the power the same way. The moment you do, the plane leaves your hand and the throw is finished. Everything after this point is watching.
6. Read the result. The distance is on the readout, the trail is drawn behind the plane, and your best throw of the round is left on the field as a ghost for the next one to beat.

The Five Things You Choose

There is no sixth decision anywhere in this game. Everything that happens between your hand and the ground is one of these five, and four of them are already fixed by the time the plane is in the air.

The fold

Sets the wing. A thin fast wing with a high stall speed, a middle wing, or a wide slow one that keeps flying when the other two have given up. You pick it once, before the first throw, and it applies to all three.

The angle

Sets how much of your throw is spent climbing. Slightly nose-down is worth more than level, and anything well above level is a throw that trades its speed for height and then has to buy the speed back at a loss.

The power

Sets how much energy the throw has in total, and it is close to free. Lift and drag both rise with the square of speed, so a full-power throw travels roughly five times as far as a half-power one on the same fold and angle.

The wind

Not yours to choose. It is rolled once per round and it displaces the whole flight downrange without changing how well the plane flies, so it moves your landing point and leaves the aerodynamics alone.

The ghost

Your best throw so far, drawn back onto the field. It is the only feedback the game gives you, and it tells you which of the other four you got wrong, if you look at it.

What Makes a Throw-Only Game Work

Most flying games give you the plane and ask you to fly it. This one takes the plane away from you at the exact moment it becomes interesting, the instant it leaves your hand, and that is a deliberate bet rather than a shortcut. What it buys is a game about commitment.

When you can steer, every mistake is recoverable and no decision is final. You can always pull up, always correct, always try again two seconds later. Take the steering away and the same two metres stop being a setup and become the entire game. A throw is an argument you make once, in advance, with incomplete information, and then have to watch play out. That is a very different feeling from flying, and it is much closer to the feeling of actually throwing something.

The design problem that creates is obvious: if the player has no input after the throw, what are they doing for the next six seconds? The answer this game settles on is that the flight has to be worth watching on its own terms. The plane weathercocks, meaning the nose swings back toward the angle the fold wants to fly at, so a throw released too nose-high will visibly hunt and settle, and a throw into a headwind will hang and drift back. You are not waiting for a result. You are watching a physical argument resolve.

Why the flat throw beats the high one

The reason a flat throw wins is worth understanding, because it is the same reason a real paper plane thrown at the ceiling lands behind you. A throw gives the plane a fixed amount of energy, and that energy can be spent on height or on speed. Height is not the goal. Distance is. Climbing converts speed into height, and getting that height back means diving, which converts height back into speed at a loss. Every metre you climb is a metre of distance you have to buy back later at a worse exchange rate.

There is a second cost on top of that. A plane flying steeply upward is flying slowly, and a slow wing has to hold a large angle of attack to make enough lift to stay up. Push that angle past the critical value and the airflow over the wing separates: the wing keeps less than half its lift and its drag multiplies several times over. The nose drops, the plane recovers, and the whole manoeuvre has cost you most of your throw. The game calls this stalling and it is what a badly aimed lob actually does.

Why the three folds are not difficulty settings

The dart flies furthest. It also has the highest stall speed of the three, and its wing needs about six metres per second of airspeed before it will hold the plane up at all. The glider sits in the middle. The wide fold needs barely half that.

That is the whole distinction, and it is a threshold rather than a slope, which is what makes it a real choice. Thrown at full power all three planes are comfortably above their own stall speeds and the dart wins, because a fast thin wing has less drag. Thrown at half power the dart drops out of the sky while the wide fold flies on, because the wide fold is the only one of the three whose wing still works at that speed. Neither is the better plane. They are answers to different throws.

The gentle detail is what happens if you never choose. The angle and power meters keep sweeping whether you touch them or not, and the game locks them at the end of the sweep, so a player who does nothing at all still gets three throws. They are just three throws nobody aimed. The game will play itself. It will not play itself well.

What the wind is doing to your plane

You throw through the air, not across the ground, and the two are not the same thing when the air is moving. Your arm gives the plane a fixed speed through the air whatever the wind is doing, because nobody throws harder to make up for a breeze, and the wind then carries the whole flight downrange on top of that. With the wind behind you the plane flies exactly as well as it would in still air and lands further away. Into the wind it flies exactly as well and lands nearer.

This is why the wind does not punish you the way it feels like it should. A lot of games treat a headwind as a tax on the aircraft, slowing it down and making it harder to fly. Here it is a straight displacement of the landing point, which is both easier to reason about and true to what a light sheet of paper in a breeze actually does. The plane is fine. The field is moving underneath it.

The wind holds for all three throws in a round. That is what makes a round a puzzle: you get one wind, you get to see what it does to your first throw, and you have two throws left to answer it.

Three Throws on a Tablet or a Laptop

The game runs in a browser with no install, no account and no download, and it plays the same everywhere, because the meters sweep at the same speeds and the throws land in the same places whichever screen you are on.

On a phone or tablet, tap anywhere on the field to lock a meter. There is nothing to hold and nothing to drag: each tap does exactly what the space bar does on a desktop, which means the timing is identical on a touchscreen and you are not fighting the interface for the score. The fold strip above the field is tappable as well, so the number keys are the only control that needs a keyboard, and they have a touch equivalent sitting right there.

On a desktop, the number keys 1, 2 and 3 change the fold and the space bar locks both meters. P pauses, and so does the escape key. The game fills the window, and if you want it genuinely full screen there is a button for that in the corner of the field.