About Upright
Upright puts a pole on a cart and asks you to keep it up. You can move the cart left and right. That is the entire control scheme, and it is harder than it sounds for one specific reason.
The correct move is the opposite of the instinctive one. When the pole starts falling to the right, every beginner steers left, away from the fall — and the pole goes over faster. What actually works is driving right, underneath it, so the base catches up with the tip. This is the cart-pole problem, the standard toy problem in control theory, and the moment it clicks is worth the first dozen failures.
How to play
- Move the cart with the left and right arrow keys, with A and D, or by holding anywhere on the board and dragging.
- Keep the pole from falling past 82 degrees off vertical.
- Do not run the cart into either wall — that ends the run as surely as dropping the pole.
- The pole shortens by a step every twelve seconds you survive.
- Your score is how long you lasted, in seconds.
Five tips that actually move your score
- Drive into the fall, not away from it. This is the whole game. If the tip is drifting right, move right. You are putting the base back under the centre of mass, which is the only thing that brings a pole back up.
- Correct early and small. A one-degree lean needs a nudge; a twenty-degree lean needs a sprint that will overshoot and start the opposite problem. Almost every loss is a correction made three seconds too late.
- Watch the tip, not the pole. Your eye tracks the whole stick and averages it, which hides the moment the lean starts growing. Watching only the top of the pole gives you the earliest possible warning.
- Spend the rail deliberately. You have a finite runway, and catching a fall costs distance. If you find yourself drifting toward a wall, deliberately induce a small lean the other way and chase it back to the middle.
- A shorter pole needs the same technique, faster. Nothing about the strategy changes as it shrinks — you just get less warning. If your technique falls apart at the third shortening, the problem is your reaction time, not your understanding.
Frequently asked questions
Why does steering away from the fall make it worse?
Because the pole falls around its base. Moving the base away from the lean increases the angle between the base and the centre of mass, which is exactly what a fall is. Moving the base toward the lean reduces that angle. It feels wrong and it is right.
Why does the pole get shorter instead of the game getting faster?
Because a shorter pole is genuinely harder in a way that speeding things up is not. Less length means less rotational inertia, so it falls quicker and gives you less time to react — the same reason a broom balances on your palm easily and a pencil does not.
Is this the same as the cart-pole problem in control theory?
Yes, that is exactly what it is. It is the standard benchmark for control algorithms and reinforcement learning, which is a large part of why it makes a good game — it is a genuinely hard problem with a simple, learnable solution.
Can I play it on a phone?
Yes. Hold anywhere on the board and the cart steers toward your finger, so you can drag it back and forth without arrow keys.
