Merge Press
Swipe to slide the sheets around. When two of the same weight touch, they press into one heavier stock — 80 becomes 160, 160 becomes 320. Keep the press running and see how heavy a sheet you can make before the bed fills up.
Bed jammed!
How to play
Swipe (or press an arrow key) to slide every sheet as far as it will go. When two sheets of the same weight collide they press into a single sheet of double the weight — 80 g/m² and 80 g/m² become 160. Every press adds a fresh 80 (sometimes 160) somewhere on the bed. Your score climbs by the weight of each pressed sheet. The round ends when the bed is full and nothing else can merge.
The numbers on the tiles are real paper weights
Gsm is grams per square metre: literally what one square metre of a stock weighs. It is the number every printer, every paper merchant and every print-on-demand supplier quotes, because it is the closest single figure to "how substantial does this feel in the hand". If you sell anything printed, it is the spec that decides whether your insert reads as a flyer or as a card, and it is the one that quietly moves your shipping weight.
| Tile | What that stock is in real life |
|---|---|
| 80 g/m² | Standard office and copier paper. Folds easily, shows print through from the back. |
| 160 g/m² | Light card. The usual weight for a flyer, a leaflet or a poster you want to survive a mailer. |
| 320 g/m² | Cover stock. Business cards and postcards typically land somewhere around 300–350. |
| 640 g/m² | No longer paper. Past roughly 400 you are into board, and it is measured in thickness rather than weight. |
| 1280 g/m² and up | Cheerful fiction. A single square metre would weigh over a kilogram. |
The ladder is honest for the first three rungs and then keeps doubling anyway, which is the joke. Getting a 640 out of the press is a genuine achievement; getting a 2560 means you have manufactured something no mill would admit to.
How the bed feeds you
The bed is four by four. A game opens with two sheets on it, and after every move that shifts or merges anything, exactly one new sheet appears in a randomly chosen empty cell. Moves that change nothing cost nothing — the press only feeds you when you have actually done something.
A new sheet is an 80 nine times out of ten. The remaining tenth is a 160, and that share grows as you climb: it holds at 10% until your heaviest sheet passes 640, then rises four points per doubling — 14% at 1280, 18% at 2560, 22% at 5120 — until it stops at 30%. That is the entire difficulty curve. Merging and scoring never change; the press just stops handing you the light sheets you need to unpick a tight bed, which is a subtler squeeze than a timer and considerably more annoying.
One rule catches most newcomers out: a sheet can only merge once per move. Slide a row of four 80s to the left and you get two 160s sitting side by side, not a single 320. The second merge is available, but you have to spend another move on it.
Anchor one corner and never break the row
The whole game reduces to keeping your heaviest sheet parked in one corner and building a descending row along the edge that leads to it — 640, 320, 160, 80 reading outward. That ordering is what lets a merge cascade: the 80s feed the 160, which feeds the 320, which feeds the 640, and none of it requires the big sheet to move at all.
Which means you should use three directions and treat the fourth as forbidden. If your anchor sits bottom-left, slide left and down freely, right when you must, and never up. The failure mode is exactly that fourth direction, and it is worth understanding rather than just avoiding: pressing up lifts the entire bottom row off the edge, your heaviest sheet included. The replacement sheet then lands in a random empty cell — and since the bottom row is now the emptiest part of the bed, that is usually where it goes, wedging a fresh 80 underneath your big stock. The heavy sheets are sitting one row in, the edge row is a scatter of light ones, and the descending order is broken in a way you cannot repair directly; you have to merge your way back out. That is the jam. The bed is never technically stuck until it is full with no equal neighbours anywhere, but a broken anchor row usually means the last ten moves are just tidying up.
Scoring, plainly
Your score is the sum of every sheet the press has ever produced. Each merge adds the weight of the new sheet — a merge into a 320 adds 320 — and nothing else contributes. Moves are free, sliding is free, surviving is free. A best score is kept in your browser's local storage so it survives a reload. Posting to the shared leaderboard is optional and only happens if you type a name and press Post after a game ends: that writes one record containing the game id, the name, the score and a server timestamp, and remembers the name locally for next time. If the leaderboard module fails to load, the puzzle plays exactly the same and the game falls back to a plain local score card.
Frequently asked questions
How do you play Merge Press?
Swipe or use the arrow keys to slide all the sheets in one direction. When two sheets of the same weight bump together, they merge into a single sheet of double the weight. A new sheet appears after every move. Keep merging to build heavier stock and raise your score; the round ends when the bed is full and no merges remain.
How is my score calculated?
Every time two sheets press together, the weight of the new sheet is added to your score. So a merge that makes a 320 sheet adds 320 points. Bigger merges are worth more, which rewards planning ahead and keeping the bed tidy.