How to play Daily Flight
Daily Flight is a one-button paper plane game. You tap to flap, you dodge pencils, and you try to beat everyone else on today's course. This page covers every rule in the game, from the first flap to Graduating.
Controls
There is exactly one input. Tap the screen on a phone or tablet, click with a mouse, or press the space bar on a keyboard. Each input gives the paper plane a short upward flap. Gravity pulls it down the rest of the time, so a run is a rhythm of small taps rather than holding anything down.
- The plane flies forward on its own; you only control height.
- Touching any obstacle, the top of the page or the bottom of the page ends the run.
- In Free Flight an extra life (❤️) absorbs one hit; see power-ups.
Scoring
Your score is the number of obstacles you pass plus bonuses. Daily Flight counts two things:
| Action | Points | Counts toward Class? |
|---|---|---|
| Passing a pencil, pen or ruler | +1 | Yes |
| Collecting a star | +2 | No |
| Close call (skimming an edge without crashing) | 0, but it is tallied on your report card | No |
Stars sit at different heights inside the gaps, so grabbing one usually means changing your line. Collecting stars never changes the course itself: gap sizes, speed and when rulers appear depend on obstacles passed, not on score. Each daily course hides one gold star, and if you take every star that reaches your plane (at least three) the report card marks a Perfect Flight.
After every run you get a report card showing your score, stars collected, close calls, flight time, personal best, day streak and, on the daily course, the percentile of players you beat.
The three modes
📅 Daily Flight
The main event. Everyone in the world gets the same obstacle course for the calendar day, generated from the date itself. You get 3 attempts, plus one bonus attempt if you watch a short ad. Your best attempt is your score for the day on the global and friends leaderboards. A best score set on the bonus attempt is marked 📺 on the leaderboard, so the board always shows which scores used the extra try. Nothing is for sale. The course resets at midnight US Eastern Time. Read how the daily challenge works in detail.
♾️ Free Flight
Unlimited practice on a randomised course. Free Flight is where power-ups appear, and where you can revive after a crash by watching an ad. Scores go on the separate All-time leaderboard.
🎮 Fly with a Friend
A live two-player race. One player creates a room and shares a 5-character code or an invite link, both players tap Ready, and both fly the identical course at the same moment. The last plane still flying wins the round. See the full guide to friend matches.
Classes: from Class 1 to Graduate
Daily Flight dresses progress up as a school year. Every run starts in Class 1, and every pencil you pass moves you toward the next class. Reaching the end of the ladder is called Graduating. Only obstacles count: stars raise your score but never your class, so the ladder is a pure measure of how far you flew.
In Free Flight and Fly with a Friend the thresholds are fixed. Each step is roughly 1.22 times larger than the one before it, which is why the early classes come quickly and the last few are a real achievement:
| Reach | Pencils passed | Reach | Pencils passed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Class 2 | 10 | Class 8 | 137 |
| Class 3 | 22 | Class 9 | 177 |
| Class 4 | 37 | Class 10 | 226 |
| Class 5 | 55 | Class 11 | 286 |
| Class 6 | 77 | Class 12 | 359 |
| Class 7 | 104 | Graduate 🎓 | 448 |
On the daily course every threshold is multiplied by the day's difficulty: 1.3× on an Easy day, 1.6× on a Medium day and 2× on a Hard day. Graduating on a Hard daily course therefore means passing 896 pencils in a single run.
Power-ups (Free Flight only)
- ❤️ Extra life: survive one crash and keep flying.
- ⏱️ Slow-mo: the course slows down for a few seconds so you can line up tight gaps.
- 🚀 Auto-boost: the plane flies itself through a stretch of obstacles; the HUD shows how many boosts you have banked.
Power-ups never appear on the daily course or in friend matches, which keeps both of those a fair test of skill.
Streaks and the calendar
Fly the daily course on consecutive days to build a day streak. The streak screen shows a week and month calendar with every day you flew lit up. Days follow the course calendar (midnight US Eastern), the same clock as the daily reset. Every 7th day in a row earns a Spare Wing (shown as a 📝 sick note), you can earn one by watching a short ad on the streak screen, and you earn one when a friend flies your shared link for their first time (one a day). You hold at most two. Miss exactly one day and the next flight uses a Spare Wing automatically, so the streak carries on; miss two days and it resets. When you sign in with Google your streak is saved to your account and follows you to any device; as a guest it lives on the device and browser you fly on, so signing in is what protects it.
Five tips for a higher score
- Tap, do not mash. Short, evenly spaced taps keep the plane level. Panicked double-taps send it into the ceiling.
- Aim for the lower third of each gap. A flap lifts you more than gravity drops you between taps, so entering a gap low gives you room to correct upward.
- Only chase stars that are on your line. Two points is not worth a crash that costs you the run.
- Use attempt one to learn the day's course. It is identical on attempts two and three, so you can memorise the awkward sections.
- Practice in Free Flight on Hard days. The daily difficulty rating is shown on the home screen before you fly.