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Cube Net Strategy: Three Checks That Find the Folded Cube

Updated October 2026

Cube Net gives you ninety seconds to answer as many folding questions as you can. Each question shows a flat net of six coloured squares and four small cubes, and exactly one of the cubes is that net folded up. Trying to fold the whole thing in your head every time is slow and error-prone. This guide shows how the wrong answers are built, which quick checks expose each kind, and how to order those checks so most questions are settled in a couple of seconds.

What you are looking at

The net is always one of the eleven shapes that fold into a cube, but it is shown in any of eight orientations, turned in quarter steps and sometimes flipped, so the same shape rarely looks the same twice. Every square has a unique pairing of colour and symbol: circle, square, triangle, diamond, star or cross. The symbol is not centred. It sits in one corner of its square, and that corner is the whole puzzle, because it records which way the face is turned.

Each cube option is drawn from the corner nearest to you, showing a top face, a right face and a left face. Those three faces always meet at a single point in the middle of the drawing. Keep that point in mind; most of the checks below are about it.

How scoring and time work

A correct tap is worth one point and the next question appears about a third of a second later. A wrong tap takes one point away, never dropping you below zero, outlines the right cube in green and locks the buttons for 1.2 seconds before the next question. The clock is real time, so it keeps going if you leave the tab.

With four options and a symmetric plus-one, minus-one scoring rule, a blind guess has an expected value of minus half a point and also costs you the lock time three times out of four. Guessing costs no points only when your score is already zero, and even then it costs time. It is almost always better to spend an extra second on a check than to tap and hope.

The three kinds of wrong answer

The game does not invent wrong cubes at random. It builds each one by taking a genuine view of the folded cube and changing it in one of three ways, then confirms that the result does not match any of the 24 ways the real cube can be held. The kind you face depends on your current score:

Knowing this lets you choose your first check. At low scores, an opposite-pair test alone always finds the answer. Higher up, you need the corner test and the rotation-direction test as well.

Finding opposite faces in one glance

Two simple patterns in the net tell you which squares end up opposite. We checked both against the game's own folding code across thousands of generated puzzles and they held every time.

Between them, these two patterns always give you at least two of the three opposite pairs, in every net the game can show. A cube has only three pairs, so the last two squares you have not paired must be opposite each other. For the long nets with a row of four, the shortcut is even quicker: in the row, first pairs with third and second with fourth, and the two squares sticking out of the row form the last pair.

Once you have the three pairs, scan the options. Any cube showing both members of a pair is wrong. On the easiest questions this leaves exactly one cube standing.

The corner test for moved symbols

A moved symbol is caught by asking where it points. Every corner of a cube belongs to three faces, so a symbol near a corner points at a spot shared with two neighbouring faces. In the net, look at the marked corner of a square and see which squares touch it along the two edges that meet there. After folding, those are the faces the symbol must point toward.

The quickest version uses the middle point of the drawing, where the three visible faces meet. Take one face on an option and find its square in the net. Look at the corner of that square where the symbol sits, and ask whether the other two faces shown on the option are the ones that meet it there, either because they are joined to the square along those two edges in the net or because they will be once it is folded. If they are, the symbol must sit at the centre point of the drawing. If they are not, it must sit at one of the three outer corners of that face. A cube that breaks this rule is a moved-symbol fake.

You do not need to check all three faces. A moved-symbol fake changes only one face, so if two faces pass and the third face is the one you have not verified, check that one last.

The direction test for mirror images

A mirror image keeps the right faces and puts every symbol in a plausible place, so the opposite and corner tests can both pass. What it cannot keep is the order of the faces around the near corner. On a correct option, going clockwise around the centre of the drawing takes you top, then right, then left. Find three squares in the net that share a single grid point, such as the inside corner of an L, and read them clockwise there. The real cube shows those three faces in the same clockwise order; the mirror shows them in reverse. In our check of the game's folding code this held for every such trio we tested.

If the three faces on an option do not share a point in the net, use the corner test on two of them instead, or look at another option first and come back.

A routine for each question

  1. Pair the opposites using the straight skip and the Z step. This takes a moment and is reused for all four options.
  2. Strike out every cube showing an opposite pair.
  3. On the survivors, run the direction test if a trio meets at one point in the net.
  4. Use the corner test to separate whatever is left.

Below a score of 4, step 2 is enough. Between 4 and 8, steps 2 and 4 finish the job, since no mirrors appear yet. From 9 upward, expect to need step 3. Practising the steps in this order makes the later questions feel like the early ones, just with one more check, and your best score is stored on your device for the next attempt.

▶ Play Cube Net Pick the cube this net folds into before ninety seconds run out.