Hi, I'm hakairyuousinn (my X account).
Hiragana Tower is a game where you drop Japanese hiragana letters one at a time and stack them as high as you can. It's a free browser game, and it runs on phones and PCs. No download, no sign-up.
The letters are just building blocks, so you don't need to read Japanese. It won't teach you hiragana, though…
How to play
Press and drag left or right to choose a spot, then let go to drop the letter. On a PC, move with the ← → keys and drop with Space.
The game ends when even one letter falls off the wooden board. The height of the tower before it fell is your record.
Letters come at random from a set of 76, including small ones and the long-vowel dash. The next letter is shown at the top right. I put tips on the how-to page.
An earlier version let ざ stand up
The collision shape of each letter matches the letter itself. Other letters can even catch on the two little marks of ざ (za).
Earlier versions built each letter from small squares, so the shapes were blocky. That flattened round bottoms, and ざ stood up when it should have fallen over. Its measured tilt on the board was 0 degrees.
I rebuilt the shapes to follow each letter's outline. Set a letter gently on the board, wait 5 seconds, and you get this.
| Letter | Tilt after 5 seconds | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| ざ (za) | About 79° | Falls on its side |
| り (ri) | About 90° | Lies on its side |
| つ (tsu) | About 181° | Flips upside down |
| へ (he) | About 12° | Rolls a little, then rests on two points |
| ー (long-vowel dash) | Almost 0° | Stays put |
つ flips right over. Not great when you're trying to stack it…
Before that, the tower kept wobbling even after it had stopped moving. I fixed that by swapping out the whole physics library.
Eight AI runs, a best of 23.6 cm
The result screen gives you a level based on height. I had no human records to set the cutoffs with, so I had AI (Codex) play eight times. It looked at the board and the next letter on every move and decided where to drop. I've had AI play my games before, as in this blind playtest.
The results ranged from 7.3 cm to 23.6 cm, with a middle of about 13 cm. In six of the eight runs, the tower fell after four letters or fewer. る rolled off to the right. The marks on で pushed つ out. That kind of thing.
I also tried a developer-only cheat. Even with nothing but long-vowel dashes, the best was 46.5 cm. Each landing nudged the tower a little, and it fell at around 30 dashes.
Here's where I put the levels.
| Height | Level |
|---|---|
| Under 20 cm | Beginner |
| 20 cm and up | Intermediate |
| 25 cm and up | Advanced |
| 30 cm and up | Expert |
| 35 cm and up | Master |
| 40 cm and up | Hiragana God |
Under the normal rules, the AI only reached Intermediate. Hiragana God sits a little below the height the cheat reached once. I don't know yet how high people can go, so these are provisional. I'll adjust them after seeing the heights people reach.
The record used to be the letter count
In the first version, your record was the number of letters you stacked. Right before release, I changed it to height in cm.
In my test measurements, two letters reached 15.8 cm and six reached 15.3 cm. That's how much the shapes and placement matter. Twelve long-vowel dashes dropped in a row reached 22 cm.
Press Share on the result screen to post the picture of your tower and its height on X. If you like, show me how high you got.
▶ Play Hiragana Tower (how to play and tips here)