Fingerboarding in video games¶
Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own docs. Condensed from Fboard's research base (researched 2026-10-25); sources are named inline.
Part of Fboard's research surveyed existing fingerboard games and studied how skate games score combos and keep runs varied. Store figures were read on 2026-10-25 from Steam, the US App Store, US Google Play and itch.io, and they change quickly.
Existing fingerboard games¶
| Game | Year | Platform | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech Deck Skateboarding | 2001 | Game Boy Color | Licensed toy tie-in; tricks add time to the clock. IGN gave it 4/10 (Wikipedia). |
| Touchgrind series (Illusion Labs) | 2008 onward | iOS, Android | The archetype: two fingers on a touchscreen act as the rider's legs. Touchgrind Skate 2 shows 50M+ Android installs. |
| Fingerboard HD Skateboarding | 2013 | Android | 10M+ installs but rated 2.2 stars: the most-installed game with "fingerboard" in its name, and among the worst rated. |
| BuriBoard | 2021 (Early Access) | Steam, Android | A fingerboarding physics simulator with 60+ tricks. |
| STUNTBOOST | 2026 | Steam | A time-trial racer on a fingerboard through cardboard tracks in a house; 98% positive from 259 reviews. A racer, not a trick game. |
| Frasher | 2026 | Browser (itch.io) | A small THPS2-styled fingerboard game. |
Adjacent games: Skatebird (2021), where a bird skates THPS-style through bird-sized parks built from household objects, is the research's pick for Fboard's closest thematic competitor. In VR, Virtual Skate and VR Skater map your hands to the skater's feet, the fingerboard idea at full size; the research found no VR game marketed as fingerboarding.
What fingerboard games teach¶
From the research's reading of reviews and store data:
- "Fingers as legs" sells itself but is hard to learn. Touchgrind reviews praise the physics and then warn about frustrating first sessions (TapSmart, TouchArcade, Gamezebo).
- Trick recognition is a trust contract. When a physics game decides which trick you did and gets the name wrong, players feel cheated (App Store reviews; the same complaint hit EA's skate. in 2025).
- Reach is not quality. The low-rated fingerboard apps have tens of millions of installs, which the research reads as people searching for fingerboard games and finding poor ones.
- The niche is thin but not empty. No well-reviewed THPS-style arcade career game about fingerboarding was found. An earlier version of the research said none existed at all; the second pass found small attempts and called the earlier claim too strong.
How THPS keeps combos in check¶
The research's THPS scoring numbers come from community decompilations of the original PlayStation code (THPS1 retail and the THPS2 competition demo), not from the developers. The demo numbers may differ from retail THPS2, and nothing was checked by running the games.
- A combo is base points times a multiplier, as in Fboard.
- Repeats lose value on a schedule of 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, then 10%, tracked across the whole run (refunded on a bail), not just within one combo.
- In the THPS2 demo the multiplier grows by one per trick up to ×14, then by 0.5 per trick.
- In the THPS2 demo, manuals get less stable the longer you hold them in a combo (the research's reading of the code), and a manual held for less than about a third of a second, ollied out of and re-entered, starts the next manual near the bail point. That last rule targets exactly the kind of manual-ollie chain that broke Fboard's scoring.
- Goals pull you around the level: letters, gaps and collectibles force variety.
The research concluded that THPS shares Fboard's original flaw (repeats still raise the multiplier) but contains it with these mechanisms, and that Fboard had none of them. That is why Fboard's TAS converged on farming one half-pipe and on an endless manual-ollie chain (see The TAS tool and showcase run).
Controls across skate games¶
| Game | Trick input | Reported frustration |
|---|---|---|
| THPS | Buttons plus a direction | (the genre standard) |
| Skate | Right-stick gestures | Gestures misread |
| Session / Skater XL | One stick per foot | Steep learning curve |
| OlliOlli | One button, stick, timed landing | The original was too punishing |
| Touchgrind | Two fingers on a touchscreen | Very hard early; trick names wrong |
Fboard's answer is a THPS-style button scheme by default plus an optional gamepad finger mode, one stick per finger, that feeds the same simulation input.
Open questions in the research¶
How THPS handles time-up in the 2020 and 2025 remakes, the developer of the 2004 PC game Tech Deck Dude: Bare Knuckle Grind (sources disagree), and sales figures for any fingerboard game.