About Daily Holes

The idea

Most golf games are either a simulator you have to install or an endless free-to-play grind. Daily Holes is neither. It is one round, in a browser, that takes about five minutes — and because the course is the same for every player that day, your score actually means something next to everybody else's. Come back tomorrow and it is a course nobody has ever played before.

How a course is built

Nothing is hand-drawn and nothing is stored in advance. The date is turned into a number, that number seeds a random generator, and the generator lays out nine holes from it — the routing, the bunkers, the water, the trees, the pin position, the tilt of each green and the wind. Because the same date always produces the same number, every player's browser builds an identical course without ever asking a server for it.

A handful of holes each day get something stranger: a sweeping arm that flings your ball away, a portal that fires you up the fairway, a band of wind you can fly over or walk under. The rarest is the crossing, a hole played entirely island to island over open water, which turns up in roughly one round in six. All of them are explained in how to play.

Why the leaderboard is honest

The same determinism that builds the course also polices it. Every shot you take is recorded — club, aim, power, the lot — and when you submit a round the server replays those shots through its own copy of the physics. If the replay does not land where your card says it landed, the round does not count. Nobody can post a score they did not actually play.

Playing against people

There is a daily leaderboard and a weekly one, and past days stay up so you can go back and see a course again. You can also add friends by a short code and play them head to head on the day's course, with both cards shown side by side at the end. An account is free and only needs an email address; without one you can still play, you just will not appear on a board.

Who makes it

Daily Holes is made and operated by Martin Seppälä, trading as Daily Holes, based in Finland. It is a one-person project — the game engine, the course generator, the artwork and the site are all built and maintained by the same person, which is why replies to email come from a human and why suggestions sometimes end up in the game.

Daily Holes has generated a new course every day since 29 August 2026, and it is still worked on more or less continuously — new hazards, new ways to play against people, and the occasional fix for something that had been quietly broken. Everything that has changed, and when, is listed in what's new.

How it is paid for

The game is free and there is nothing to buy. Running it costs money, so it is funded by advertising served through Google AdSense — two small banners, one on the menu and one on the results screen, and none at all while you are playing a hole. What those ads collect, and how to turn off personalised advertising, is set out in the privacy notice.

Get in touch

Bugs, account questions, privacy requests and ideas all go to the same place — dailyholes.com@gmail.com. There is more detail on the contact page.