Draw the Hill Tips: How to Draw a Road That Lasts

Draw the Hill gives you one tool, a pencil, and one job: keep a small red car moving. Every line you draw becomes solid road the moment you let go. The car rolls wherever gravity sends it, and the run is over when it falls off the road or stops for too long. The trick is not drawing a lot. It is drawing the right line at the right time. Here is how to draw a road that lasts.

The first line decides the first ten metres

At the start the car sits on the end of a green pipe at 0.0 m and waits. It only moves when there is ground in front of it. Start your first line right at the lip of the pipe and take it down, not level. A car that starts on a slope picks up speed for free; one that starts on flat ground crawls, and a crawling car is the one that meets the hourglass. Then curve the line gently back up so the car carries its speed forward instead of burying it in a dip.

Avoid a deep U-shape. In testing, a line that dropped steeply and then climbed steeply left the car rocking in the bottom of the valley, unable to climb out. The hourglass appeared, then the “Try Again!” card, at under eight metres.

Draw in short pieces

You can start a new line anywhere on the paper, as often as you like. That is the most useful fact in the game. Instead of one long road drawn at the start, draw a short stretch, watch where the car is heading, and add the next piece a little ahead of it. Short pieces let you react to what scrolls in from the right. A long line drawn early is a bet on a course you have not seen yet.

Draw ahead of the car, not under it. A line dropped straight across the wheels can catch the car mid-bounce, and a car that lands nose-first on a fresh line tends to stop dead.

Pipes: aim for the gap early

After the first few metres, green pipes start to appear. Some grow up from the bottom of the page, some hang down from the top, and often you get both with a gap between them. The car cannot go through a pipe, so your road has to carry it through the gap; a car that runs into one stops, and a stopped car brings the hourglass. Start the road towards the gap as soon as the pipe pair is on screen. A steep last-second ramp tends to throw the car at the top pipe.

Hills, not walls

The car is a proper physics object with weight and momentum. It speeds up going down, slows going up, and can flip onto its back if it hits a steep face too fast. Two small bumps carry it further than one tall hill. If you need height to reach a gap, climb in a long gentle ramp and keep something downhill in reserve after it.

The hourglass

When the car stops moving, an hourglass appears on the paper. It is a countdown, not a decoration: if the car is still stuck when it runs out, the run ends. The cure is almost always a short line sloping down just in front of the wheels, so the car can roll off whatever it is stuck on. Drawing a new hill in front of a stopped car does not help, because it has no speed to climb it.

Coins without crashing

Yellow coins float along the course. The car collects any it touches, and the total shows under your best distance. Coins pay for new vehicles, but a coin is never worth a run. Bend the road up through them only when the curve still points at the next gap.

Ready to try it? Play Draw the Hill, or read the guide to coins, cars and the store.