Daily Unfold

Daily Unfold is a spatial puzzle with almost no rules to learn. A square of paper is folded a few times along dashed lines, then a hole is punched through every layer. You are shown the folding sequence and where the punch landed, and you mark on an empty grid where the holes will be once the sheet is opened back out. Then you submit and watch it unfold. Three puzzles land every day at Easy, Medium and Hard, each with more folds and a bigger grid than the last, and clearing all three unlocks a timed Expert board with a global leaderboard.

1. Read the sequence across the top. Each numbered step is one fold: the dashed line is the axis, the arrow shows which half is moving, the shaded region is the paper that moves. The final panel shows the punched hole as a solid dot.
2. Hold the two conventions in mind. Folds always come toward you, never behind the sheet, and a punch goes through every layer sitting under it.
3. Tap the empty grid below the sequence, which is the full size of the original sheet, to mark every hole you expect.
4. Submit, watch the paper unfold, and collect your stars. Accuracy sets them, and a perfect read is worth three.

Paper folding is the standard test of spatial visualisation, the sort of thing that turns up in aptitude batteries, and it is a strange and welcome thing to meet it as a daily habit instead of an exam question. It works because you cannot brute-force it: there is no vocabulary to memorise and no arithmetic to grind, only the mental rotation, and either you can see it or you slow down and unfold it one axis at a time. Star scoring keeps a near miss from feeling like a wasted day, and the timed Expert board gives the people who see it instantly somewhere to go.

The unfolding animation is the answer sheet. You submit, the paper opens, and your marks are laid against the real holes. Scoring is by accuracy rather than pass or fail, with stars for how close you got and three for a perfect read, so a near miss still lands somewhere instead of simply failing. Expert changes the register entirely: it runs a timer and posts your solve time to a public daily leaderboard, where you appear under a nickname you pick once and can change from the leaderboard view.

Easy

A four by four grid with one fold. A single fold mirrors the punch, so one hole becomes two.

Medium

Six by six with two folds. Two folds double the layers, so one punch can open into four holes reflected across both axes.

Hard

Six by six with three folds, which the game says can produce up to eight holes.

Expert

Unlocked once Easy, Medium and Hard are all cleared. It runs a timer and submits your time to a public daily leaderboard. The site describes its board two ways: the front page calls it a timed 8x8 puzzle, the How to play page says it uses the hard difficulty.

Archive

Earlier days can be replayed at any time.

• Unfold in reverse. Take the last fold first and mirror the holes back across its axis, then do the fold before it. The game's own guide says the same, and trying to picture the whole sheet at once is where most people come unstuck.
• Count layers before you count holes. How many holes you should be marking is set by how many layers the punch went through at that spot, so if your marks and your layer count disagree, one of them is wrong.
• Symmetry is your checksum. Every fold axis is a mirror line for the finished pattern, so a prediction that is not symmetric across the axes you were shown cannot be right.
• Expert only appears once all three daily boards are cleared, so the leaderboard has an entry fee and it is the rest of the day's puzzles.