How to play Vault
There is a hidden code. You have nine guesses, and every one of them tells you something.
The rules
- Tap symbols to build a guess, then hit Check. The highlighted slot is where the next symbol lands — tap any slot to aim there instead. Aiming at a symbol you have already placed means the next tap replaces it; Undo and Clear row take things back.
- Each guess is answered with three numbers. Exact is how many symbols are the right symbol in the right place. Near is how many belong within one slot of where you put them — one to the left or one to the right. Far is how many are in the code but wider than one slot from where you played them.
- The answer never says which ones, and it never says where. Working that out is the whole game.
- Symbols can repeat. The code might use the same symbol twice, or leave one out altogether.
- Nine guesses. Run out and the code is shown, and you keep credit for the closest row you managed.
Reading the three numbers
The counts are about the whole row, not about any particular slot, and each symbol in the code is only counted once. If the code holds a single circle and you guess three circles, you are told about one circle — not three.
That rule is what makes the numbers trustworthy, and it is also the one that trips people up. Exact plus near plus far can never be more than the code is long. If you play four symbols and get "2 exact, 1 near, 1 far", every symbol you played is in the code somewhere — one of them belongs a single slot away, and one belongs further afield.
When a symbol could count as near, it does: the game always grades a misplaced symbol as generously as the code allows, so a "far" is a promise — that symbol is not within one slot of where you tried it, and on a short code that often pins it almost exactly.
The method, if you only read one thing
Do not try to guess the code. Work out what is in it, then work out the order. Those are two separate jobs and the first one is much easier than it looks.
Open with two shapes a row, in pairs — two circles, two squares, and a triangle in the odd slot. Whatever comes back, the three numbers add up to how many of those shapes the code contains, because there is nowhere else those counts could have come from; and unlike a row of one repeated shape, the near and far counts also say roughly where they sit. A second row of the other two shapes covers the palette — move the odd shape to a different slot so its second answer is not the first one again — and the two sums give the count of the shape in both rows by subtraction.
Two rows and you know the ingredients and most of their neighborhoods. Only then is it worth thinking about position, and by that point the puzzle is small enough to reason about instead of guess at. The one thing the sums cannot tell you is a repeat from a shape you never played — a second diamond and a lone star count the same — so keep one row for that doubt.
Players who get stuck almost always do the opposite — they keep playing plausible-looking full codes and hope. That is the slow way: a plausible code that is wrong tells you much less than a deliberately silly one that answers a question.
The hint
Hint picks one shape from a guess you have already played and shows, on that row, which of the three counts it belonged to: the shape gets a small tag — exact in green, near in orange, far in red — and the matching count on that row flashes. The tag stays on the board, so the answer it explains keeps explaining itself. The tutorial behind the ? on the board has you take one.
Hints go in order: the earliest guess first, left to right, and never the same shape twice. Only shapes that counted are labeled — a shape that was not in the code is never picked. Each hint costs 10 points, and once every counted shape has been labeled the button goes quiet.
Opening well
A first guess cannot be wrong, but it can be wasteful. On an average day, one guess cuts the possibilities from around 1,300 to about 200 — so the opening move is doing more work than any single move after it.
Two pairs and a single is a better opener than five different symbols or five of the same. Five different symbols tells you a lot about which symbols are in play and nothing about repeats; five identical ones tell you exactly how many of that symbol there are and nothing else, not even where. A pair of pairs sits between the two, and the tutorial behind the ? on the board walks you through a whole crack from it, on your own taps.
After that, the useful habit is to play something that could actually be the answer. A guess that you already know is impossible still returns its numbers, but it cannot be the day's code, so it can never end the puzzle on the spot.
The shapes change daily
The code is five slots long, and the par is printed above the board. A handful of early puzzles in the archive have four; the working row always shows how many.
The palette is always five shapes, drawn from a set of seven, so which five you get changes from one morning to the next while the size stays put. That is variety you can see rather than difficulty you cannot: a day never repeats the palette of the four before it.
A bigger palette is what really costs you, and by more than it looks. Measured across the whole bank, going from five symbols to seven at the same code length adds almost a full guess to par, while adding a slot adds only a quarter to a third of one — even though the extra slot multiplies the number of possible codes far more. A longer code reports on more positions with every guess, so it partly pays for itself. A wider palette adds unknowns and gives nothing back.
That is deliberate. With a single fixed shape every day plays almost identically; the difficulty of a fixed board varies by barely half a guess from its easiest day to its hardest. Changing the shape is what gives the week some texture.
Par, and how it is scored
Each puzzle carries a par: the number of guesses a good solver needs on that particular code, worked out by simulation when the puzzle was made, plus one guess of room. Matching par or beating it scores full marks, and each guess beyond it costs you. The room is deliberate — a solver that never makes a mistake is a harsh thing to be marked against — and it is one guess rather than two because the near and far counts already carry real slack: read them well and par is honest work, not luck.
If you run out, you are scored on your closest row — how many symbols you had exactly in place. That can never reach what a solve is worth, and it does not need a rule to say so: a row with every symbol exactly in place is a solve.
How scoring works covers the numbers across all four games.
Why the symbols are shapes
They are shapes that happen to be colored, never colors alone. A palette you can only tell apart by hue is unplayable for a color-blind player, and this game is entirely about telling the palette apart.
Past puzzles
Every Vault so far is in the Vault archive, each with its solution worked through — and a day you missed can still be played, for a score that sticks.