About Daily Unfold
A daily paper-folding puzzle for people who like thinking with their hands — no account, no ads for the core puzzle, fresh every day at midnight.
What is Daily Unfold?
Daily Unfold is a spatial-reasoning puzzle. Every day you’re shown a piece of square paper that gets folded one or more times, then has holes punched through it. Your job is to predict where those holes will appear when the paper is unfolded back to its original shape.
There are three difficulty levels each day — easy (4×4, one fold), medium (6×6, two folds), and hard (6×6, three folds) — plus an optional timed Expert mode with a public leaderboard. Each puzzle takes most people about 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. The full daily set is designed to be done in under five minutes.
Why does this game exist?
Paper folding and hole punching is a classic spatial-reasoning task that shows up in IQ tests, admissions exams, and psychology research going back decades. It’s one of those tasks that feels both easy and oddly difficult — your brain has to simulate a physical transformation that the eyes can’t see directly.
Daily Unfold started as a side project to explore whether that task could be turned into a daily habit, the way Wordle turned anagramming into a daily ritual. The answer, after a few months of playing and tweaking, is: yes, with the right difficulty curve and a short daily set, it works.
How the puzzles are made
Every daily puzzle is generated from scratch by a procedural generator. The generator picks fold axes, positions, and punch locations, then simulates the unfold to compute the answer. A scoring function rates how “hard” a candidate puzzle is based on properties like hole symmetry, fold orientation, and overlap — and only puzzles that land in the right difficulty band for the day are kept.
We wrote up the nitty-gritty details of the generator in a separate post: Modeling What Makes Paper-Folding Puzzles Hard.
What makes it different
- No account required. Everything is stored in your browser. Streaks, stars, and tutorial progress live on your device.
- Three difficulties every day. Not one puzzle — a progression. Easy warms you up, hard stretches you, Expert puts you against the clock.
- Real procedural generation. Puzzles aren’t pulled from a hand-authored list. Every day is fresh, and the generator keeps the difficulty honest.
- Fast. The whole day’s set is a 3-5 minute ritual. It’s meant to fit into a morning coffee, not replace one.
- Offline-friendly. The game is a PWA. Once loaded, it works without a connection.
Who built it
Daily Unfold is a solo project by Mert Aslan, a software engineer who happens to like puzzle games. Everything you see — the puzzle engine, the site, the procedural generator, the writing on this blog — is built by one person as a side project. If you have feedback, a bug report, or just want to share a particularly satisfying solve, feel free to reach out directly.
The game runs on Next.js and Supabase. The puzzle engine is a custom TypeScript fold simulator. Analytics come from Google Analytics and TikTok; advertising comes from Google AdSense and Google H5 Games Ads, which keeps the game free.
Contact
For feedback, bug reports, press, or partnership inquiries, you can reach us at mertaslan16@gmail.com.