Fold

📖 Strategy guide: How to solve Fold: read the target backwards, and trust the backs

How to play

The whole game is two rules. Tap a crease and the shorter side of the paper turns over onto the longer side, so its back now faces up; on the middle crease the left half (or the top half) is the one that turns. Fold until the prints showing on top match the target picture, in as few folds as you can.

Every cell of the sheet is printed on both sides, and the two sides differ. Folded cells stack up, and only the top print of each stack counts. "See the back" turns the paper over so you can look at the other side, the way you would with a real sheet; it is not a fold. ↶ unfolds the last fold and ↻ starts the sheet again, but every fold you make counts. On a keyboard, Tab moves between the creases and Enter folds; T turns the paper over, Z undoes, R restarts.

Daily, levels and challenges

The daily sheet is the same for everyone and changes at midnight UTC; the board keeps your first result of the day. Easy is a strip of six cells. Normal is a 3 by 4 sheet and Hard a 4 by 4 sheet, with creases both ways. ⚔️ copies a link to the exact sheet so a friend can try to match your folds.

How the puzzles are made

Each sheet comes from a number, the seed. The generator prints a random sheet from six prints, folds it by a random sequence of real folds and photographs what is on top: that is the target, so every target can be reached. A breadth-first search over every way the sheet can be folded then finds the fewest folds that show the same picture, and that is the par. Targets of a single cell are thrown away, and so are sheets whose par falls outside the level's range (Easy 2 to 3, Normal 3 to 4, Hard 4 to 5). Paper halves fast, so pars are small: the puzzle is which creases, and in what order.

Tips

• Start from the size of the target: it tells you how far the sheet must shrink in each direction.
• A cell folded once shows its back; folded twice, its front again.
• Folding at the edge or at the middle shrinks the sheet the same direction by different amounts. Try both in your head before you tap.

Designed and built by the Eigengames team; sheets generated and checked by our own solver.