Halfway

Halfway is a free online cut shapes in half game: one straight cut, two pieces, and the only question that matters is how close to 50/50 you got. A paper rubber duck, a croissant, a slice of Swiss cheese or the boot of Italy lies on a cutting mat; you press, drag a line across it and let go. The shape splits along your line, the pieces slide apart and their shares of the area pop up: 49.6 | 50.4. It is a quick test of how good your eye really is, it runs in your browser with no download, and a run takes well under a minute, which makes it one of our favourite quick games.

There are 158 shapes in seven sets: food (pizza, a pretzel with three holes, a bitten cookie), animals (a cat, an octopus, a giraffe), countries and US states drawn from real map outlines (Italy, Japan, Chile, Norway, Texas, Michigan, Hawaii and its islands), everyday objects (a teapot, scissors, glasses), letters and numbers, landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the pyramids, a torii gate) and tricky geometry (a spiral, a gear, a star, an off-centre ring). Holes count for nothing, separate pieces all count, and shapes with an obvious mirror line never appear in a half round, so there is no free axis to cut along.

Rounds do not always ask for a half. The default run, Five cuts, deals a friendly half, a tricky half, then cut off exactly a third, a half on a spinning shape and finally cut off exactly a quarter. Every round that is not a plain half says so loudly: a card over the shape, a coloured frame around the mat and the target split under the shape, and the result shows the target above your cut, so a perfect half on a quarter round reads WRONG SIZE and tells you why. The small piece always counts, on either side of the line. At the end a score card lists all five splits and your total out of 5,000, ready for a screenshot or the share button. Played for fun, Five cuts gives everyone the same five shapes each day: after each cut you see where everyone else cut that shape today, and how many of them you beat.

Endless keeps the shapes coming until three cuts are way off. New round types arrive as you go (quarters, thirds, spinning shapes, a tenth, and blind cuts where the shape hides the moment you press), the line for way off tightens from 4 % to 1.5 % and the clock shortens, so every run ends somewhere. Its leaderboard ranks how many shapes you got through. Scoring is steep in both modes: a perfect half is worth 1,000 points, 49.9 | 50.1 about 900, 49.0 about 460 and a cut that is 10 % off nothing, and speed adds nothing because precision is the whole game. Every ranked run is re-simulated on our servers, which puts Halfway among our competitive games.

The area rule is simple and exact: your cut is the whole straight line through the two points you drew, and each side's share is all the paper on that side, however many pieces a concave shape falls into. The game measures every shape as an exact polygon, so the percentages are not an estimate, and it plays the same with a finger on a phone or a mouse on a computer. It is a precision game and a little geometry lesson in disguise, which is why you will also find it among our brain games, skill games, aim games, mobile games, PC games and casual games for adults.