ONTOURS
One person,
a lot of lines.
Kontours is a daily puzzle where scattered lines spin into a picture — and the goal is to name it before you've seen the whole thing. It's made, start to finish, by one person.
Who's behind it
Hi — I'm Will. By day I'm a plant-biology PhD researcher: I spend my time under a confocal microscope watching how cells respond to stress, building the odd piece of lab instrumentation when the off-the-shelf version doesn't exist. Kontours started as the thing I couldn't stop tinkering with at night.
The idea came from a spinning line-art drawing toy and a simple question: how little of a shape do you actually need to recognize it? It turns out the answer is "surprisingly little," and the gap between almost-enough and just-enough is where the whole game lives.
How it's made
Every puzzle is generated by a pipeline I built from scratch. It takes a drawing, breaks it into layers, and uses an image-recognition model to score how guessable the shape is at each stage of the reveal — so the difficulty curve is measured, not guessed. That research-brain instinct to measure the thing rather than eyeball it is probably the most "day job" part of how Kontours gets built.
The whole game runs as a single, fast, no-tracking web page. No app to install, no account to make, no ads. Just today's puzzle.
Kontours is made by one person, so your note actually reaches me. Found a bug, have an idea, or just want to say hi?
hello@playkontours.com