Tetherpop
Pop · Keep · Deliver
The game loads when you press play.
- Free
- No ads
- No account needed
- No install — plays in your browser
About the game
Pop the wrong letters, keep the right ones aloft, and beat the clock. A breezy letter-and-word arcade game in eleven languages.
The sky post needs a sorter, and that is you.
Letter tags drift over the depot, each one carried by a bunch of balloons. Some of them belong on today's delivery; most of them do not. Pop the balloons under the wrong tags so they drop into the sorting net, and leave the right ones floating. When a tag's last balloon goes, the tag goes with it — so letting the wrong one fall costs you a life.
A shift keeps going until your lives run out, and every round is harder than the last: more tags, more balloons, a stronger breeze and longer words. It mixes four kinds of sorting job. Spell the word from loose letters. Find the one word that matches. Keep every word that contains a given letter. Or send the numbers out strictly in order. The panel at the top of the screen always tells you what to keep and what to pop, and the clock is always running.
Watch for the gull. Every so often one swoops through the depot and snips a balloon at random, and it does not check the manifest first. Gold balloons pop everything around them — worth double if your keepers have drifted clear, a disaster if they have not.
Tetherpop reads and plays in eleven languages, and the puzzle is built from each one's own script — Latin letters, Cyrillic, Chinese characters, Japanese kana and Korean syllables all work the same way. The Post Room lets you set the round type, the clock, the lives, the crowd and the breeze, including a strict mode where a single mistake ends the round.
Entirely offline. No account, no network, no advertising, no purchases.
How to play
- Tap the balloons of tags you do NOT need. When a tag's last balloon pops, the tag falls away.
- Letting a wanted tag fall costs a life. The panel at the top tells you what to keep.
- Clear every unwanted tag before the timer empties. Time left over scores a bonus; running out costs a life.
- A gull swoops through now and then and snips one balloon at random — sometimes one you needed.
- By default the shift never ends: every round brings more tags, more balloons, a stronger breeze and longer words. A perfect round wins back a life.
- A gold balloon also pops two balloons on every tag around it, and whatever that drops scores double. Wait for your keepers to drift clear.
- Every four clean drops raise your multiplier. Popping a balloon you needed, or losing a tag, resets it.
Controls
| Touch | Tap a balloon to pop it. |
|---|---|
| Mouse | Click a balloon to pop it. |
| Keyboard | Arrow keys or WASD move the cursor (hold Shift for fine steps), Space or Enter pops, Tab jumps to the next bunch; Esc or P pauses, M mutes. |
| Gamepad | Left stick moves the cursor and LT slows it for precision; A or RT pops, LB and RB jump between bunches, Y re-centres, B, X or Start pauses. |
