Code Breaker

Code Breaker Screenshot

Overview#

Code breaker is a game where a code is chosen from many tiles of different colors/runes/counts and you must figure out what the code is via a series of guesses and feedback from those guesses.

How To Play#

  • Create a game on your PC
  • Select difficulty, we recommend medium or above if you’ve played a lot of puzzle games before.
  • All players visit https://puzzop.tv on their phones
  • Once all players are in click the start game button on the host or on a players phone.
  • The blank tiles in the top left are the code you have to guess.
  • All the possible tiles are split evenly amongst the players and shown on their screens. If you start in singleplayer mode (on the host with no players joining), a panel will be shown in the top right with all possible runes.
  • Players can press the tiles shown on their phone screen to add them to the current guess.
  • The guess will show up on the main screen below the hidden code.
  • Once a guess is complete (has as many tiles as the code does) the game will show a series of colored lights, these lights corrospond to each tile you placed and how closely it matches the same position in the code. The first light is how well the first guess tile matches the first code tile. The second light is how well the second guess tile matches the second code tile etc.
  • The guess tiles can match either the color of the code tile, the number of runes on the code tile, or the type of rune on the code tile.
  • The lights are:
    • Red: Your guess doesn’t match any of the color, rune or rune-count of the tile in the same position of the code.
    • Orange: Your guess matches one of color/rune/rune-count of the tile in the same position of the code.
    • Yellow: Your guess matches two of color/rune/rune-count of the tile in the same position of the code.
    • Green: Your guess completely matches the tile in the same position of the code.
  • You have 15 minutes to solve the code. Good luck!

Advanced Tips#

  • Try some random combinations in the beginning, and then look at what lights are given and you can use them to eliminate possible tiles to determine what the final code may be.

FAQ#

I can’t figure out the code, none of these runes seem to match#

  • If you’re really stuck there is a “reveal code” button in the bottom right of the main screen that you can click to temporarily see the code. One player or a friend could take a peek to see what you’re missing.

Design Decisions#

It’s hard to coordinate all players placing runes, why didn’t you add a way to confirm tile placements?#

  • I left it this way because your score is based on time taken rather than total guesses. And I wanted the gameplay to be more fast paced and frantic with lots of people, rather than slow paced. You can take as many guesses as you like to solve the code so if you mess up one guess, don’t worry about it, just try it again.

Why are there so many different tiles?#

  • To add more complexity to the game to make it more challenging than normal code solving games. There are 840 total possible tiles (6 colors * 4 counts * 35 runes) and a random subset of them are picked for each game.