I wrote a symmetry game with a daily puzzle
I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…
In plain words
Hidden Mirrors is a puzzle game where players identify symmetries in a grid of tiles that have been repeatedly mirrored and modified. The game presents a small region transformed through multiple mutations, making the original pattern difficult to recognize at first glance. Players solve puzzles by detecting hidden symmetries, with added complexity when only partial regions are visible due to board edges. The game offers a daily puzzle and is designed for players who enjoy pattern recognition and spatial reasoning challenges.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the app stores, but after spending some money on marketing, I didn’t have line of sight to something people would pay for. I had built it around a hosted level API to tweak levels between version releases, making it prone to software rot over a few years. SSL certs would expire, credit cards would expire, App Store agreements need to be renewed, etc.. Without a continual drip of effort I wasn’t motivated to put in, it defaulted to broken. With that software rot in mind, and hoping to make something that would be around for a while for my friends and family to play, I started making a web-only, client-side only version. Still prone to rot, but not nearly as many moving pieces. It’s missing some of the polish of the original and the puzzles aren't hand curated with a graduating difficulty, but it’s playable on many modern devices. The generated puzzles are good ~75% of the time. I’m still working out how to detect the dud puzzles- they are playable, but not fun. I’ve got ideas on what defines a “good” puzzle, but haven’t formalized them into a fitness function yet. One other note– while there are almost definitely UI bugs (please report!), if it says the puzzle can be solved in X taps & flips, it can. Those numbers are derived from how the puzzle itself renders, so it’s (thankfully) not prone to producing impossible to solve puzzles. Merely ones that may appear so at first-- hence the name. Today’s puzzle is a good difficulty to start with, a new one generates daily at midnight EST. There's no cookie or tracking, so let me know if you're playing!
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IMI made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries2024 · rahulilango.com · ▲1,054
This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this: - For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes)…
- PPPipes puzzle (a.k.a. Net) on a hexagonal grid2022 · hexapipes.vercel.app · ▲537
Hello, HN - I wanted to share this puzzle game I made during my vacation. I'm rather fond of the pipes puzzle where your goal is to restore a scrambled network of connections by rotating tiles. It's usually played on a grid of squares and this all started when I decided to make a programmatic solver for that kind of puzzle. Then I realized that with some minor changes the solver could generate new puzzle instances. I thought about what kind of puzzle to make and someone suggested a hexagonal grid. Adapting the generator wasn't too hard but then I had to create a way to play this variant. So…
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- IMI made a math puzzle game. Hope you like it2025 · madmonk13.github.io · ▲35
I've been playing with this for quite some time and I think it's finally ready for public consumption. All feedback welcome.
- SASineRider, a math puzzle game2023 · github.com · ▲181
Messing with your TI-84 graphing calculator is a rite of passage for every teenager who has ever been bored in a math class. In 2013 I was that teenager, and it gave me an idea for a tiny game about sledding on graphs. This project grew into my white whale, and I spent my twenties trying and failing to finish it alone. I shelved the game when I started working for Hack Club in 2018—until last May, when a few community members took it off the shelf. The project took on a life of its own, and turned into a year of nights and weekends from a global team of 20+ teens in 8+ countries. Today…
- MNMy New Puzzle Game2024 · shovemedia.com · ▲9
This is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time, and I decided to finally code it up. In the same way that Scrabble decomposes words into letters, what if there was a game that decomposed letters into sub-shapes? There’s a lot of directions this could go, and I’m still exploring the possibility space. Enjoy. Suggestions welcome. It doesn’t have a real name yet.
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