The pieces
There are six peg colours. Each one also carries a small shape, so you can tell them apart even if two colours look alike to you.
- Embercircle · key 1
- Tealsquare · key 2
- Skytriangle · key 3
- Limediamond · key 4
- Amberstar · key 5
- Lilacplus · key 6
The board has eight rows, one per try. The lit row is the one you are filling. To its right sit four small squares where the hints, called pips, appear after you press Crack it.
Reading the pips
- Amber pip: one of your pegs is the right colour and sits in the right slot.
- Cream pip (an outlined square): one of your pegs is a colour the code uses, but it is in the wrong slot.
- Dark square: nothing to report for that peg.
Pips are always shown amber first, then cream. They never point at a particular slot. Four amber pips means the vault is open. A row with zero pips is useful too: it tells you none of those colours are in the code at all.
Repeated colours are counted fairly. If the code has one Teal and you play Teal three times, you get at most one pip for Teal, never three.
Your controls
- Tap a colour to drop it into the selected slot. The selection then jumps to the next empty slot.
- Tap any slot to select it. Tap a filled, selected slot again to empty it.
- Undo empties the last peg you placed.
- Crack it sends the row. All four slots must be filled.
- On a keyboard: keys 1 to 6 place colours, Backspace undoes, the arrow keys move between slots, Enter sends the row and P uses Peek.
Peek
Once per vault you may press Peek. It reveals one slot of the code and pins that peg into your row for the rest of the vault. Peek costs 150 points from that vault's score and cannot be used on your final try, so it is a rescue, not a shortcut.
Classic and Tricky
| Mode | Code | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Classic | Four different colours | × 1 |
| Tricky | Colours can repeat | × 1.5 |
Switching mode starts a fresh run. If the run you leave had points, they are added to your player card first.
Runs, vaults and points
A run is a chain of vaults. Open one and the next is ready straight away. Fail a vault (eight tries without four amber pips) and the run ends, the code is shown, and the run score goes onto your card.
A cracked vault is worth:
- 300 points, plus 120 for every try you did not need;
- times 1.5 in Tricky mode;
- plus 10 % for every vault already cracked in this run, up to plus 50 %;
- minus 150 if you used Peek (a vault never pays less than 50).
Example: cracking a Classic vault on your third try, first vault of the run, no Peek, pays 300 + 5 × 120 = 900 points.
Ranks
Your player card keeps the lifetime total and gives you a title:
- Rookie — where everyone starts
- Tumbler — 1,500 points
- Keysmith — 6,000 points
- Codebreaker — 18,000 points
- Vault Ghost — 45,000 points
Points are a score, nothing more: they cannot be spent, swapped or sent anywhere. For a simple opening plan, see the strategy answer in the FAQ, then put them to work on the vault on the start page.
