Everything you need to know to build a champion racing loft
Pigeon Racer is played from the Play tab — but first you'll need to register an account. Register from the homepage with a username, email, password, and your country — UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, USA, or China. Country selection is required: it sets your home club, your local map, and the flag that appears next to your name on race entries, the leaderboard, and your public profile.
Game progress is stored in your account so you can pick up your loft from any device — laptop at home, phone on the train, work computer at lunchtime — and the game remembers where you left off. The game saves automatically as you play (see the Auto-Save section below) so you rarely need to think about it.
Your account also tracks your money balance for online races and auctions. Rather than living only inside the save file, your balance is held server-side and stays in sync between devices, so prize money won on one device is available immediately on another.
The game saves automatically at sensible moments so you don't have to remember to. An auto-save fires after every race day, after culling or retiring a bird, after listing a bird at auction, after a sickness diagnosis, and after a bird returns from being lost — among others. The manual SAVE button is still there if you want it, but in normal play you'll rarely need to use it.
If you click a nav link or close the tab while you've got unsaved progress, the game does one last save automatically before you leave. You'll see a brief "☁️ Saving before leaving…" toast — once it completes, the page proceeds. If something goes wrong with that final save (e.g. you're offline), you'll get a small popup with three options: Try Again, Leave Anyway (discards the unsaved progress), or Cancel (stays on the page).
Distances and speeds can be shown either the British way — miles and yards per minute — or the way the sport is scored across most of Europe: kilometres and metres per minute. Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland all race in metric, and if you have never used yards it is very hard to judge whether 2,459 ypm was a good flight.
Look for the narrow strip on the left-hand side of the clock panel, at the top right of the game screen: the language flags sit at the top of it and the mi / km button underneath them. One click switches it. The setting lives on your account rather than in a save file, so it applies to every career you play. The website pages — leaderboard, race pages and public profiles — still show miles and ypm for now; they will follow the same setting in a later update.
Race distances were set as round numbers in miles, so converted they read a little untidily — a 300 mile race is 483 km rather than a neat 500. That is the honest conversion rather than a rounded one: velocity is distance divided by time, and a tidied-up distance would not survive you checking the arithmetic.
The game can also be played in Polish or European Portuguese. The flags sit directly above the mi / km button in that same strip — click one to switch, and your choice is remembered.
Translation is a work in progress. Most of what you read day to day is done, but some screens are still in English and are being filled in as we go. Bird names, ring numbers, club names and loft names always stay exactly as they were written, in every language.
Pigeon Racer plays on phones. Hold the phone sideways (landscape) — held upright you'll just see a prompt to turn it. Tap the ⛶ button for full screen: it hides the browser bars and gives the loft far more room.
When you start a new game you'll choose which country you want to race in — UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, USA, or China. This sets your home club, your local map, and the rivals you'll race against in single-player. The country you registered with is separate — that's your nationality, the flag shown next to your name on online races, the leaderboard, and your public profile. You begin with a small team of pigeons, a basic loft, and enough money to get started. The goal is simple: breed better birds, win more races, and build a reputation as the finest racing loft in the world.
The game runs on a daily cycle. Each day you can train, feed, breed, race, visit the shop, or list a bird at auction. Most actions advance the calendar — by the end of the season you'll have raced through your local club calendar and be looking ahead to the next breeding round.
The clock in the top-right panel can run on its own, one game day at a time, or stay stopped. The button under it shows ❚❚ PAUSE while the clock runs and ▶ START while it is stopped.
When you pause, the clock stays paused — through race day, entering a race, international races, and even closing and reloading the game. Nothing moves until you press ▶ START, or step the calendar yourself with +1 Day or Next Race. New careers start paused, so you can look around before the first day ticks by.
Coming back to the game? ▶ CONTINUE on the start screen takes you straight back into the career you played last.
Every pigeon has four trainable racing stats:
Each bird is graded into a Class reflecting its overall ability — a higher class is stronger. Balance still matters, though: a bird maxed in Speed but weak in Stamina will fade badly at longer distances.
Alongside the trainable stats, four condition values track how a bird is doing day-to-day:
All four condition values are visible on every bird's stats popup. Manage them actively — the difference between a podium finish and a back-of-field run often comes down to form and fatigue more than raw stats.
In the loft, each bird (and each breeding box) sits in a coloured halo that tells you its state at a glance:
Fanciers know their own birds, and most lofts end up with sprinters, middle-distance birds and long-distance birds. You can record that judgement on each bird so you don't have to hold it in your head.
Open a loft section and switch to ▦ List View. There is a Dist column: click a bird's cell to cycle it through Spr (Sprint), Mid (Middle), Lng (Long) and back to blank. Click the Dist heading to sort by it, so all your long-distance birds group together when you're picking a team for a 500-mile race.
The tag is saved with the bird and shows wherever you list your loft.
Club races run throughout the season at distances from 50 to 500 miles. Each race costs an entry fee, and the prize pool is split among the top finishers. You compete against your club's AI rival lofts as well as any birds they enter.
When entering a race you'll see the Bookmaker panel showing odds for all entrants — a useful guide to how your bird is expected to perform. Don't rely on it blindly; wind and weather conditions can shift outcomes significantly.
Every race day has weather: wind (strength and direction), a condition — sun, cloud, rain or storm — and a temperature. Tailwinds speed the field up, headwinds slow it down, rain and storms punish poor navigators hardest, and a hot day at a long distance drains a bird's condition for the week after rather than slowing it on the day.
Open the 🏠 LOFT MENU and choose 📅 Weather - or click the wind display 📅 at the top of the map. Both open the same panel to open the 7-day forecast. Tomorrow's forecast is right about nine times in ten; by day seven it's closer to a rough guess — the panel shows the confidence next to each day, and race days are marked 🏁. The forecast firms up as the day approaches, and reloading will not change it.
Every bird also has its own tolerance for wind and for the wet — two different things, and neither is ever shown as a number. The only way to learn a bird is to race it and read its record: the Analysis page breaks results down by weather so you can see which of your birds fly through rain and which sulk in it. Both tolerances are inherited from the parents, so a bad-weather loft can genuinely be bred.
Results are animated live on the race map. After the race, each bird's record is updated with their finishing position, velocity, and any prize money won.
Not every bird makes it back on the day. Most that go missing turn up over the following days, tired and out of form. Intelligence is what brings a bird home — a well-schooled bird is far less likely to go astray, and the sharpest never do at all.
Once in a while a missing bird has been hawked — caught by a bird of prey. It comes home, but wounded, and it will never race again. It can still go to the Stock Loft to breed from, or be culled. Its genes are untouched: this is an injury, not a fault, and a hawked bird can still throw good youngsters.
Training tosses carry a much smaller version of the same risk. Birds lost on a toss are away for fewer days and come back in better shape — and a bird is never hawked on a training toss, only on a race.
You'll always be told: after the results of any race — club or international — a message lists the birds that didn't come home. Some are reported by another fancier or a member of the public who has read the ring (you'll hear the phone ring), and those arrive the next morning. When a lost bird comes home you get a message with its ring and the day it arrived, even if you skipped ahead several days — check its health and treat it before it races again. A lost bird is not shown in its loft box while it is away; if it comes back it is there again.
Breeding is the heart of the game. Pair a cock and a hen to produce offspring who inherit a blend of their parents' stats, with some genetic variation added to keep things interesting.
The key concept is the Gene Ceiling — each bird has a natural cap on how high their stats can be pushed through training. Breeding consistently raises this ceiling across generations, which is how you produce elite birds over time.
Raising that ceiling gets harder the higher you climb. Early on a well-chosen pair can lift a whole family quickly. Near the top of the range progress slows right down, and the very best birds in the game are the work of many generations rather than a season or two — which is where Breeder-type birds earn their keep. If your best family seems to have stopped improving, that is the ceiling tightening, not a fault in your pairing.
When two high-class birds are paired together, they may form a Golden or Exceptional pair. These rare combinations have a chance of producing offspring with a beneficial mutation — a significant stat boost beyond normal inheritance. You'll know one when you see it.
Eggs hatch after a set number of days. Chicks must be weaned before they can begin training. Plan your breeding cycles around the race calendar so your best youngsters are ready for the new season.
If you'd rather not pair every bird by hand, the Race Team tab has an Auto Pair button. It randomly matches all your eligible cocks and hens into pairs in one click — skipping any bird that has already bred this year or is on a breeding cooldown, and leaving the extras unpaired if you have more of one sex than the other. Once the pairs are formed, press Breed and the whole batch breeds at once, with a single confirmation rather than pairing each one individually. Note that racing birds breed only one round per year.
In both the Stock Loft and the Race Team you can drag a bird from one box to another — with the mouse, or your finger on a phone. Drop a cock on another box and he swaps places with the cock already there; the same goes for hens. If the box you drop on has no bird of that sex, yours simply moves in. A green outline shows you can drop there; red means you can't.
It makes trying out partners quick: move a hen next to a different cock, look at the pair, and move her back if you change your mind. A wrong pair is fixed in one move instead of emptying every box and starting again. A normal click on a box still opens it as before.
A paired bird's nest is worth keeping an eye on. What is happening at the nest plays its part in getting the very best out of a racing bird — working out how to use that is part of the game. What the game will always tell you is exactly where a nest is up to.
You'll find it in five places:
When you pair a bird, the confirmation gives you the date the chicks are due to hatch and the date they will leave the nest. Pair backwards from a race you want to target and you can decide what state a bird is in when it goes to the basket.
A pot egg settles a pair without producing chicks — useful when you want the pair down but do not want more young birds to feed and house.
Every bird carries a full family tree. The Pedigree popup — accessible from any bird's stats screen — shows three generations of ancestry: parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Each ancestor displays their name, sex, and key stats so you can see at a glance which bloodlines are feeding into your current team.
Pedigree is preserved permanently. Even if a bird is sold, retired, culled, or has died of old age, their record stays in the registry so their descendants' lineage remains complete. This makes it possible to trace a champion all the way back to the original starter birds you began the game with.
Pedigree popups are available on your own birds, birds listed in the Club Auction and Online Auctions, and on rival entries throughout the online race and bookmaker pages — useful for spotting which lines are producing winners across the wider game.
Training improves a bird's stats up to their genetic ceiling. Regular sessions build speed, stamina, and intelligence, but add fatigue. Balance your training schedule against the race calendar.
Alongside the paid distance-training tosses, the Training tab has a free Loft Fly button. Loft flying is gentle home exercise: it builds Form much like training does but adds only about half the fatigue, costs nothing, and doesn't drain health. It won't push a bird's stats up — that's what distance training is for — but it's the ideal way to keep birds ticking over and topped up on form between hard efforts, especially when they're too tired to train properly.
Different feed blends suit different phases of the season. Racing Mix is a good all-rounder; YB Mix is optimised for youngsters. Barley is useful for recovery periods. The in-game shop sells bags of feed that are consumed daily based on the number of birds in your loft.
Vitamins boost form and aid recovery. They're sold by the bottle and dosed individually to specific birds. Use them strategically before key races rather than blanket-dosing the whole team.
When a bird's racing career is over, you can retire them to the Stock Loft. Stock birds are your permanent breeding pool — they don't race and are available to pair at any time.
The Stock Loft is where your best bloodlines are preserved. Carefully curate which birds you retire here — not every race winner is a great breeder, and not every average racer is a poor one.
Stock birds are paired with each other. Racing birds are paired in the Race Team, once per season.
If a bird isn't worth keeping in either the racing loft or the stock loft, you can cull them from the stats popup. Culled birds are gone for good, but their pedigree record remains in the registry so any descendants' lineage stays complete.
To cull several birds at once, use the Cull button on the Cocks, Hens, or Young Birds tab. This enters cull mode, where you tick the birds you want to remove (they turn red) and then press Confirm Cull. To speed things up, a row of class buttons lets you select every bird of a given class at once — for example tap C2 to select all your Class 2 birds, then simply click any you want to keep to deselect them, and confirm to cull the rest. Clear resets the selection.
Running a loft costs money. Feed, vitamins, vet bills, race entries, and shop purchases all add up — and on the income side you've got prize money, auction sales, and the occasional windfall. The Finance system tracks all of it so you always know whether the loft is in profit or eating into your savings.
Every Friday you'll see a weekly finance popup summarising the previous seven days — total income, total expenditure, and the net result. It's a quick health check on whether the current week paid for itself.
For the deeper view, the Records tab includes a Finance sub-tab showing every transaction logged against the loft, broken down by category. You can compare any two periods side by side — week vs week, month vs month, season vs season — with colour-coded changes so you can see at a glance whether you're spending more on feed, winning more in prizes, or paying out more in vet bills.
Every race your birds fly is recorded, and the Records → 📈 Analysis screen turns that record into something you can actually read. It answers the question every fancier asks eventually: what does my loft actually win in?
Looking for one bird? Type part of its ring — the last 3 digits are enough — into the 🔎 search box at the top. It works on every tab: it picks the bird on By bird, filters the Team picker and Breeding tables, and on Whole loft lists the matching birds to open.
The Whole loft view breaks your results down four ways:
There is also a plot of each bird's form on race day against where it finished, so you can see for yourself how much the training in the weeks beforehand is really worth.
The By bird view takes one bird at a time: its velocity across its whole career, and a race-by-race table showing the conditions it flew in and what shape it was in. If you have tagged a bird Sprint, Middle or Long, the page will tell you when its actual results disagree with your tag.
Your local Club Auction runs inside the single-player game. It opens on the 1st of each month, and any birds in your club — yours plus rival lofts — can be listed or bought. The highest bid when the auction closes wins the bird.
Guest lots appear automatically — these are birds from other AI lofts in your club. Keep an eye out for undervalued birds with good stats that the rivals have overlooked.
You can list your own birds too. Set a reserve price, and if bidding exceeds it when the auction closes, the bird transfers and you receive the funds.
The Club Auction is the local market — only your single-player game knows about it. If you want to buy from and sell to other real players, that's the separate Online Auctions page on this website (covered further down).
Once you've established yourself in club racing, International Racing opens up. Three continental circuits are available — Europe, USA, and China — each with their own map, rival lofts, and race distances starting at 600 miles.
International races are longer and tougher. Stamina becomes critical, and the competition from rival lofts is significantly stronger than at club level. Prize money is substantially higher to match.
Your player home loft position on the international map depends on your chosen country. When a race is announced, you travel to the release point and compete across the map back to your home loft.
Online Races are scheduled global events where real players from around the world compete against each other. Each race has an open period for entries, a closing time, and a settle time — once the race runs, results are calculated and prize money is distributed automatically.
To enter, browse the Online Races page and pick an open race. You'll see the distance, entry fee, prize pool, and any age restrictions on eligible birds. Choose one of your birds that meets the requirements and confirm — the entry fee is deducted from your balance immediately, and your bird is locked to that race until it settles.
When the race settles, your bird's finish position, velocity, and any prize money won are recorded against your account. The next time you log in, a winnings popup fires automatically and credits the prize money to your balance. The in-game money on your loft will catch up too as soon as the game loads. No manual claiming needed.
Birds that have raced online build a public race history visible on your profile, and the strongest entries climb the global leaderboard.
You don't have to enter a bird to take part in an online race. The Bookmaker lets you place a small wager on which bird you think will win the race. Odds are calculated from each entrant's recent form and stats, with longer odds on outsiders and shorter odds on favourites.
One important principle: raw stats of other players' birds are hidden. You can see their name, sex, owner, and recent race results — and you can view their pedigree — but you can't see their exact speed/stamina/intelligence numbers. Bookmaking is meant to reward judgement, not stat-counting, so the only way to assess an unknown bird is to read its racing record and ancestry.
Bets are placed against your account balance and settle automatically when the race finishes. Winnings are credited to your balance the same way prize money is — a popup fires when you next log in and adds them automatically.
You can choose your market when placing a bet: Win bets pay out only if your chosen bird finishes 1st, while Place bets pay out if your bird finishes in the top 3. Place bets pay at one quarter of the win odds in return for the wider safety net — a 4/1 shot returns 1/1 if it places. Pick the market that suits your read of the race: short-priced favourites are often better backed to win; longshots are often better backed to place.
Online Auctions are cross-account — every listed bird is a real bird owned by a real player. Browse and bid on the Auctions page on this website (top nav). New lots can land at any time; each runs for a fixed 48-hour bidding window from the moment it opens.
Listings are created from inside the game, not the website. Open the bird's stats popup, choose to list at auction, and set a reserve price. As soon as you list, the bird leaves your active loft and moves into auction limbo for the duration of the listing — you can't race it, breed from it, or train it while it's listed. This is deliberate; it stops the same bird being entered into races mid-auction.
When the 48-hour window closes one of three things happens:
You can also withdraw a listing yourself from inside the game, as long as nobody has placed a bid yet. Once even one bid is on the lot, you're committed until the window closes.
From the Auctions page, click any lot's DETAILS button to see the bird, its full pedigree, race record, and current high bid. Place your bid above the current high (or above the reserve if there are no bids yet). The bid amount is deducted from your balance immediately.
If you're outbid, your stake is refunded right away — you don't have to wait for the auction to close. You'll see the refund land on your balance and you can decide whether to come back with a higher bid.
Next time you load the game after a returned listing, you'll see a slate-blue popup with an ↩️ icon — "Auction Returned: [bird name]" — with a one-line reason underneath (withdrawn, no bids received, or reserve not met). Your bird is already back in your loft when the popup fires; no action needed, it's just letting you know.
Trading is a straight swap — one of your birds for one of theirs. No money changes hands. It is the third way a bird moves between real players, alongside the Online Auctions and the in-game Club Auction, and it is the only one where you choose exactly what you get.
One player makes an offer, the other accepts or declines. Nothing moves until it is accepted.
A traded bird keeps the ring number it was born with. A Polish bird that comes to a British loft is still ringed PL, with the year it was actually bred and its original breeder’s initials. That is how it works in the real sport, and it is how you can always tell where a bird came from, however many lofts it has passed through.
What does change is its loft number. Bird numbers start again at 1 in every career, so an arriving bird is given the next free number in yours. A bird that was #1452 in its old loft might become #54 in yours.
Everything: full three-generation pedigree, race history, wins, gene ceilings, mutations, bloodline and plumage. A traded bird is the same bird, in a different loft. Its record does not reset.
From the moment an offer is made until it is accepted, declined or cancelled, both birds are locked. Neither can be raced, listed at auction, or offered to somebody else. This stops the same bird being promised twice, and it means an offer you have forgotten about is quietly keeping a bird out of your race team — so decline the ones you do not want rather than leaving them.
Offers expire on their own after 7 days.
If you have more than one career, the trade page shows the birds from the career you played most recently, and the bird you receive arrives in that same career. Load the career you want to trade from and save it first, and the trade page will follow you.
Trades settle on the server, so one can be accepted while your game is open. The next time you load, the bird you traded away leaves your loft and a ⇄ Trade Completed notice tells you what left and what arrived in its place. Nothing is lost and there is nothing to click — it is just letting you know.
The Leaderboard ranks every player who has competed online, across seven tabs:
The top three on the Most Wins tab fill the podium at the top of the page. Every loft name on the leaderboard is clickable.
Clicking any username — on the leaderboard, on a race entry list, in the forum, or anywhere else around the site — opens that player's public profile. You'll see their country, member-since date, their headline race stats, recent race history, and the racing birds they've fielded online with each bird's win/place record.
Profiles are public but respectful — only birds that have actually raced online appear, and exact stats stay hidden in the same way they're hidden in the bookmaker. Private breeding stock and birds that have never raced online never show up on a public profile, so you can keep your champion bloodlines for racing and not for spectating.