A game by mana — an association being founded

Shut the Box —
nine flaps, two dice.

Shut the Box — also called Canoga, Klappenspiel or Batten Down the Hatches — is the old pub dice game. Here as a wooden box you tap: roll the dice, then flip down the flaps that add up exactly to the pips. All nine shut means zero points — nothing beats that.

Play in the browser Download

No account
No ads
Works offline
Costs nothing

The wooden box mid-round: flaps 3, 5 and 7 lie tipped forward showing their smooth wooden backs, the rest stand upright over green felt. Two dice lie in front; top left the toolbar, top right open 30, below it says hit 7. — Twenty seconds, a real round — uncut.

The rules, in full

Shut the Box: the rules in four sentences

All flaps stand open. You roll.
Shut the flaps that together add up exactly to the pips — a single one or several.
Once the open total is small enough, you may roll with one die fewer.
When no move is left, the round is over. Your score is the sum of the flaps still open — less is better, zero is perfect.

Close-up of the row of flaps: 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 stand upright with their numbers, while 3, 5 and 7 lie tipped forward showing their smooth wooden backs. Two dice in front on green felt.

In full, with a round played through: the rules. Flaps 1–10 and 1–12, single flaps only, plus and minus are under variants, playing together under with others — none of it is needed to start.

The box, up close

What you see is the box

No menu bars over a playing field: the box fills the screen, and almost everything you touch is the box itself. The dice are the button — tap them to roll, tap them again to shut your selection. Icons top left, score top right, one line at the bottom. The rest is wood.

You reach straight for the box

Tap the dice to roll, tap a flap to choose it, a second tap on the dice flips them down. You play at the thing itself — after one move you know how.

The rules that applied at your table

Flaps up to 9, 10 or 12. One die from 7 on, single flaps only, plus and minus — set the version you learned it with.

Four around one device

Taking turns, as a tournament with a play-off if you like. The device lies in the middle and you sit around it — the way the box would lie on the table.

The start menu runs in front of the same box: above it the name Pipfold and the line flaps 1 to 9, two dice. — The menu runs in front of the real box — the variant is visible right away.

The two dice large on the green felt, 3 and 4 face up. Behind them the row of flaps, out of focus. — Rounded dice with sunken pips, thrown in an arc with two bounces. A tap rolls them.

Very close to the left corner: flaps 1 and 2 stand upright, 3 lies flat. The chamfer, the hinge rod and the grain are visible. — The wood is computed, not photographed: growth rings around a trunk axis, its own grain per board.

The big variant: twelve flaps from 1 to 12 and three dice in the box. — The big variant: twelve flaps, three dice.

The same round in the walnut set: dark wood, red felt, dark dice with light pips. — Three sets. Here walnut with red felt.

High-contrast mode: white flaps with black numbers, clear edges, no dark rim around the digits. — A high contrast mode for weak sight or bright daylight.

Every shot comes from the running game.

Download

Four ways, all free

All lead to the same game — the browser version gets new things first, the packages follow.

In the browser

Nothing to install. The first load pulls about 14 MB, after that it runs without a connection.

Play now

iPhone & iPad

There is no app in the store — instead the website puts itself on your home screen.

Open pipfold.com/spielen in Safari
Share → “Add to Home Screen”
It then runs full screen with its own icon, offline too

Android

From our own F-Droid repo, not from someone else’s store. About 55 MB, with no network permission.

Get the Android package

With the mana store you also get signature checking and updates; the fingerprint to verify it yourself is in the manual.

For the computer

Standalone programs, no browser.

macOS — 59 MB
Windows — 37 MB
Linux — 28 MB

The macOS package is only ad-hoc signed: on first launch use right-click → Open.

Honest limits

Four things we tell you up front

Several players only on the same device. No server, no friends list, no invitation — that is a decision, not a missing piece.
Your progress stays on the device. With no account there is nothing to sync.
In the browser it hangs on the browser. Clearing site data takes statistics and settings with it.
On iPhone as a home-screen icon. It is not in the App Store.

Everything else is stated openly in the manual.

Disclosed

What is inside this box

As of 8 September 2026, counted over this game’s versioned source files. The shared mana toolkit lives in its own directory and is not counted.

Lines of code: 9874
Source files: 22
Commits: 162
Test runs: 6
First commit: 24 July 2026

Built with:

Godot 4.7
GDScript
One shader for the wood
WebAssembly
Caddy in a container
HTML & CSS, no framework

Who made this

A game that wants nothing from you

Pipfold is made by mana, a Swiss non-profit association in formation, based in Tägerwilen. It has no account, no tracking, no ads and no in-app purchases, and it never will — not because we haven’t got round to it, but because that is the point of the association. The source is open under the AGPL-3.0. Shut the Box itself is centuries old and belongs to nobody. What is ours is this wooden box: the grain, the dice, the sound of a flap hitting home.

From the same house

More from the association

Besides Pipfold, three other things have been released so far — built and run by the same people, under the same rules.

Whatever else is being made is on mana.how, the games on games.mana.how.

Shut the Box —nine flaps, two dice.