Safe Crackers

The gist

You're a crew of hackers cracking one safe with several locks, together and against the clock. Everyone has a lock on their phone, but the instructions for your lock are on someone else's phone, and you're holding the instructions for other people's locks. Nobody can open their own lock alone. The only way through is to talk out loud: read out your fragments and open every lock before time runs out. Think of it as a co-op escape room where your screen is useless without your teammates' voices.

How to play

1. Briefing. The TV walks you through the rules.
2. You get a lock. One lock appears on your phone: a wire panel, a number maze, a color dial, a keypad, Morse code and more. There are 70+ types, so your puzzle almost never repeats.
3. You also get other people's instructions. Along with your lock, your phone shows instruction fragments, but they describe other players' locks, never your own. The steps for your lock are spread across your teammates' phones.
4. So talk. Read your fragments out loud: "Whoever has the wire panel: cut by color priority, red first, then blue, then green." The owner listens and acts. Then someone reads out yours. The whole game is voice coordination between phones.
5. Cross-lock puzzles. Some fragments don't give you a number directly. They point to another lock's screen: "the cut direction depends on τ, and τ = the number of wires on the Wires panel. Ask its owner to count." Values are chained (α feeds β, β feeds γ...), so a single step can mean gathering clues from several phones.
6. Crack them all. Open every lock before the timer hits zero and the mission is complete. The TV then shows your time, your mistakes, the fastest cracker and your crew rank.

Phones and voices

This is the heart of the game, so here it is plainly:

• The solution to your lock is never on your own phone. It's split into fragments held by other players.
• Don't peek at other people's screens. The hidden instructions are the game. Start looking over shoulders and the whole point is gone.
• In teams of two or three, everyone holds more locks (see "Scoring"), so even a small crew has plenty to do.

Scoring

The game is co-op. The whole team wins or loses together: there's no player-vs-player contest, just one shared result.

• One safe, many locks. The number of locks depends on the crew: 1 lock per player with 4–8 players, but 2 locks each with 2–3. So two players get 4 locks, three get 6, and a full crew of eight gets 8.
• Mission timer. Time = seconds per lock × number of locks, set by the host's Mode (see below). More locks means more time, but also more coordinating.
• End-of-game awards put the heroes on the TV: the fastest lock cracked, who made the most mistakes, the MVP (the player who held the most fragments for the fastest-cracked lock), plus fun titles: Instruction Master (held 3+ fragments) and Quiet Hero (everyone else).

Mistakes and limits

• A mistake is any wrong move on a lock (the wrong wire, a wrong code).
• Every mistake costs time. Each wrong move takes 15 seconds off the clock, so panic guessing hurts.
• 3 mistakes and the mission fails on Advanced, Hard and Hardcore. That's 3 mistakes for the whole team, and the game ends on the spot. On Easy, mistakes only cost time and the team never gets knocked out.
• If a player disconnects, their locks freeze and the timer pauses. They have 30 seconds to get back. If they don't, the mission fails automatically.
• If a player leaves for good, their unopened locks and their fragments are handed out to the rest of the crew, so the mission can still be won.
• No peeking. Reading someone else's screen instead of asking out loud ruins the whole idea. Use your voice.
• Invalid but harmless actions (tapping an option that isn't there, repeating a move you already made) are simply ignored. Only a genuinely wrong answer counts as a mistake.

Settings

Before the game, the host picks a Mode. It sets the time per lock, the lock difficulty, whether the TV shows every lock (the easier modes mirror your puzzles on the big screen; the harder ones hide them, so you coordinate by voice alone) and how mistakes are punished.

Higher difficulty makes the locks themselves nastier: more wires, bigger mazes, tighter color tolerance, longer Morse and trickier math.

Tips

• Read your fragments out loud the moment you see them. They're useless to you but gold to that lock's owner. The sooner you say them, the faster the team moves.
• Call out your lock first ("I've got the keypad!") so everyone knows where to send instructions.
• Work out chained values together. When a clue says β = α + 3, find who has α, settle the number once and call out the result so nobody has to redo the math.
• Don't guess to "test" a lock. A wrong move costs 15 seconds, and outside Easy it also uses up one of only 3 mistakes. Confirm the instruction first, then act.
• On Hard and Hardcore the TV is blind, so stay disciplined: one person talks at a time, and repeat and confirm numbers before you cut.

Winning

There are no winners or losers within the crew. You all succeed or all fail together. To win, open every lock in the safe before the timer hits zero (and, outside Easy, before the team makes 3 mistakes). Crack it and the TV gives you a crew rank based on how it went:

• ELITE CREW: safe cracked with 4 or fewer mistakes (a clean, sharp run).
• PROS: safe cracked with 5 or more mistakes (only possible on Easy, where mistakes don't end the run).
• DISASTER CLASS: the safe beat you (time ran out, 3 mistakes, or a teammate never came back).