Daily Unfold
A paper folding puzzle game
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I built a daily puzzle where a piece of paper is folded and hole-punched, and you predict where all the holes end up when it's unfolded. It's the kind of thing I used to do in grade school with actual paper and scissors, and it turns out the mental version is a surprisingly good spatial reasoning challenge.Three difficulties each day: easy is a 4×4 grid with one fold, hard is 6×6 with three folds.It's built with Next.js. The puzzles are generated deterministically on the fly using a daily seed.The engine runs a forward simulation of the paper folds using 2D coordinate mirroring, then calculates a "cognitive difficulty score." It weights factors that mess with human spatial reasoning, like off-center folds that break obvious symmetry and mixed-axis folding. It then automatically rerolls the daily seed until the easy, medium and hard puzzles form a good difficulty curve.Would love to hear your feedback!
HN · launched Mar 23, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 0 views
Niche: browser puzzle games · 310 launches, 26 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 310 launches in browser puzzle games →
Could you build this?
Yes This is a 2D spatial puzzle web application with geometric transformation logic for 2D fold lines and hole coordinates, easily generated and visualized in JavaScript/Canvas/SVG.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Brain Age, Lumosity
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 418 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #382 of 419 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 145 days after the earliest competitor.
- Tiled Words, a daily puzzle inspired by board games and crosswords · hn · 2025-10-29 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Totle, daily math puzzle game; Saturday puzzles have the fewest answers · hn · 2026-11-09 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Flexboxle · hn · 2026-01-31 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- A puzzle I couldn't solve for a year · hn · 2026-08-21 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Plioro — Paper Puzzle Game · ph · 2026-11-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Gridl · hn · 2026-02-23 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Brain Jam: Daily Puzzle Games · ph · 2026-10-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Jointter · hn · 2026-10-31 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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