How To Play
You start with one normal sheet of printer paper. The game assumes it is 0.1 mm thick, which is about right for everyday office paper. Every time you press Fold, the paper is folded in half and its thickness doubles.
- Tap or click Fold, or press F on a keyboard.
- Press Unfold (or U) to go back one fold.
- Press Iβm done when you want to stop and share how far you got.
As the stack grows, the camera zooms out so you can always see it. Real things show up next to your paper at the same scale, like a credit card, a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower and Mount Everest. Later, the stack passes things in space, like the Moon, the Sun and faraway stars.
The panel at the top shows your number of folds, the thickness in easy units, and the exact math underneath.
What Your Score Means
Your result is the number of times you folded, plus the biggest thing your paper passed. Here are a few stops along the way:
- 3 folds: 0.8 mm, already thicker than a credit card.
- 14 folds: about 1.6 m, nearly as tall as a grown-up.
- 22 folds: about 419 m, taller than the 330 m Eiffel Tower.
- 27 folds: about 13.4 km, taller than Mount Everest at 8,849 m.
- 42 folds: about 440,000 km, past the Moon.
- 69 folds: past Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, 4.24 light-years away.
- 103 folds: wider than the whole observable universe, about 93 billion light-years across.
Your highest number of folds is saved as your personal best on this device.
Tips To Improve
- Guess first. Before each big landmark, guess how many folds it will take. Most people guess far too many.
- Watch the βNextβ line. It tells you exactly how many more folds you need to pass the next thing.
- Read the exact number. The tiny line of math shows that nothing is rounded. Doubling really is that powerful.
The Real Answer to How Many Times Can You Fold Paper
For a long time, people said you could not fold a sheet of paper in half more than 7 or 8 times. Try it with a normal sheet and you will see why. After about 7 folds, the paper is a tiny, thick lump that will not bend.
Then a high school student named Britney Gallivan took on the challenge. According to Guinness World Records, on 27 January 2002 in Pomona, California, she folded a single strip of tissue paper in half 12 times. The strip was about 1.2 km (4,000 feet) long.
To plan it, she worked out a formula for folding in one direction. It says the shortest strip you need is L = Οt/6 Γ (2βΏ + 4)(2βΏ β 1), where t is the thickness and n is the number of folds. She explained it in her booklet βHow to Fold Paper in Half Twelve Timesβ, published by the Historical Society of Pomona Valley in 2002.
The game uses her formula to show how long a strip of printer paper you would need for each fold. By fold 20 it is already longer than the distance around the Earth, which is why the folds after 12 only happen on screen.
Sizes in the game come from common published figures, such as 8,849 m for Mount Everest from the 2020 survey by China and Nepal, and 384,400 km for the Moonβs average distance from NASA.
