TL;DR

  • About one Halfsies run in ten ends in a bonus round. One of them, Small Change, asks for a single cut that takes off exactly 25% by weight.
  • A half has a mirror line your eye can check. A quarter does not, so people guess it worse.
  • The game's own guide says to find the half first, then halve the lighter side. The brownie guide on the same site gives the same advice for thirds and sixths.
  • Two half-judgments beat one quarter-guess, in the game and in the kitchen.

Halfsies is my daily cutting game. You get three hand-drawn objects a day, cut each one by eye, and a scale weighs the two halves. Once in a while the game changes the job. Today its guides page wrote up the rarest version: the bonus round.

The Halfsies guide Halfsies Bonus Rounds: How Quarters and Small Change Work, opening with its one-line answer: about one daily run in ten ends in Quarters or Small Change, worth up to 60 extra points
The bonus round guide on The Ledger, 9 November.

Two rounds, one in ten runs

When a run starts, the game rolls once. Five runs in a hundred get Quarters, five get Small Change, and the rest get nothing extra. Quarters asks for three cuts that leave four equal pieces and judges you by your worst piece. Small Change asks for one cut that slices off exactly 25% by weight. Either one pays up to 60 points on top of the usual 300.

A quarter has nothing to check against

Small Change looks like the easy one. One cut, and you only need a quarter, not a precise half. It is not easy. When you halve something, your eye can fold it in two and compare the sides. A quarter has no mirror. You have to picture where one quarter of the weight ends, and on a lopsided object that is rarely a quarter of the way along.

The scoring makes small misses visible. A slice of 20% and a slice of 30% are both 5 points off, and both score 80% accuracy, which pays 22 points. At 22.5% you are at 90% and earn 38. The curve is steep at the top, so careful cuts pay far more than quick ones.

Find the half first

The guide's advice is the useful part. Picture where the 50% line would go, then halve the lighter side of it. Two half-judgments are more reliable than one quarter-guess. It also says to take the quarter off the thin end, where a small slip moves less weight, and to remember that a long handle looks big and weighs little.

Quarters has the opposite trap. A first cut that lands 55/45 caps the round at 90% accuracy even if the next two cuts are perfect, because every later cut inherits the first error. So the care goes into cut one.

The Halfsies guide How to Cut Brownies Into Equal Squares, with a table of grids for 9x13, 8x8 and 9x9 pans
The brownie guide on The Ledger, 9 November.

The brownie pan says the same thing

The other guide that went up today is about cutting a 9x13 pan of brownies into 24 even squares. Its method: halve the long side, cut each half into thirds, then halve the short side twice. Thirds of a small piece are easier to see than sixths of a big one. For the strips you cannot halve, it uses toothpicks along both edges as targets before any cut.

It is the same rule as Small Change. People judge halves well and everything else badly, so you turn every other fraction into halves wherever you can. I like that the game and a kitchen guide land on one piece of advice, because that advice is what the game is quietly training.

The Halfsies ad diary #11 has the rest of the day, including the ad account, which spent nothing again. The tenth diary covers the verification banner Meta put on the account.

Both guides are on The Ledger, and the game is at halfsies.jejestudios.com.

Play Halfsies free on iPhone or on Android.