After the Password: Paul, the Last Step and How a Run Ends

This guide covers the end of a run: the moment Paul hatches, the re-type box, the ways a run can finish, and what changes when you press Start again.

The moment Paul hatches

Paul hatches as soon as rules 1 to 18 are all green at the same time, which is also when rule 19 appears. Often the keystroke that does it is the last character of the hex code. From then on, any edit that leaves the password without a 🐔 ends the run with the screen Where is Paul?. The egg does not count any more. So the first thing you type after rule 19 shows up has to be the chicken. Add 🐔 next to the egg, then delete 🥚. Rule 19 is not green until the egg is gone and there are at least three 🐛 in the password.

The feeding clock starts at the hatch and ticks every 30 seconds. On each tick Paul removes the first 🐛 in the password. If he finds none, the run ends with Paul starved.

The re-type box comes and goes

When all twenty rules are green, a box appears under the rule cards: re-type your password exactly, from memory. Pasting is blocked in that box, so every character has to be typed again, emoji included.

The game checks the rules again on every keystroke and every 15 seconds. If any rule fails, the box is hidden until everything is green again. What you already typed in it stays. Three things can break a rule while you are typing:

• The clock moves on. The time rule accepts the current minute and the one before it, so a time typed at the start of a minute stays valid for about two minutes.
• Paul eats, and you drop below three 🐛.
• Midnight passes, and the day-of-the-week rule wants a new day.

Paul keeps eating during the last step

A caterpillar Paul eats is removed from the password itself. Your re-typed copy must match the current password character for character, so after a feed it has one 🐛 too many. Delete one from your copy and it matches again. Starting the last step with five or six caterpillars gives you more time before rule 19 turns red.

Typing emoji without paste

A finished password holds at least a moon phase, 🐔 and three 🐛. In the main password box you can paste, and the game turns whatever you paste into plain text. In the re-type box you cannot, so use the system emoji picker: Windows key + . on Windows, Control + Command + Space on a Mac. The Enter key does nothing in the main box, because the password is one line.

How a run ends

Screen	What caused it
Password accepted.	Your re-typed text matches the password. The screen shows its length in characters, the 20 rules and the time since the run began, then says: Please never use it anywhere.
Paul starved.	A 30-second feed found the chicken but no caterpillar.
Where is Paul?	After the hatch, an edit left the password without 🐔.

Every end screen has one button, Start again.

What changes when you start again

Start again, or reloading the page, clears both boxes and restarts the run timer. Two rules get new values. The captcha is a fresh sum of two numbers, the first from 3 to 11 and the second from 2 to 10, so the answer is always between 5 and 21. Rule 18 picks a new colour from a fixed set of ten, and the digits in its hex code count toward the sum of 25:

Hex code	Digit cost
ff00aa, 00ccff, aa00ee, ffaa00, cc0000	0
bb2200, 2200bb	4
ee0044, 0044ee	8
00ff88	16

The sponsors, countries and element symbols stay the same from run to run. The day, the moon phase and the time follow the real date and clock, not the run.

Other games on this site

The games page sorts the rest of the shelf by type. Word games include Word City Crossed, Popular Words, Word Chains, 4 Pics 1 Word, Hangman and Word Search. Logic puzzles include Bloxorz, Minesweeper, Online Sudoku and Little Alchemy 2. Typing Fighter, Flags Quiz and Trivia Crack sit under typing and trivia. Each one has its own page.