How to play Password Gauntlet
This is a puzzle where you create a password that survives an ever-growing list of absurd rules. It starts easy, an uppercase letter, a number, and then a new rule appears at each step, until all 16 are in play. Your password must pass all of them at once, so every edit has to respect the rules you already cleared, from the current moon phase to the chemical symbol for today's date.
The newest rule is rarely the problem, the old ones are. Read each rule twice before you type, and keep track of what your password already satisfies, its length, its digits, its special characters, so fixing one rule does not break another. Slow down near the end: the last few rules are where most runs fall apart. If you get stuck, start over with a fresh password instead of patching the old one, a clean start is often faster than untangling five rules at once. And remember that the rules never go away, a rule you passed on round three still has to hold on round sixteen.
Keep the password expandable
Think of the password as a sentence you keep adding words to, not a finished answer. Leave room in the middle for the long words that come later, the month, the country, the Roman numerals, and do not lock the digits in place too early, because the sum of 25 has to survive every edit that follows. A password that is already tight at rule 5 will snap at rule 9, when the Roman numerals have to multiply to 35.
The traps that end runs
Three traps end more runs than any other. The first is the time rule: it changes every minute, so a password that is perfect at 10:41 fails at 10:42. The second is the prime length rule near the end: every word you add to satisfy a late rule changes the length, so a password that was 29 characters becomes 31 or 33, and 33 is not prime. The third is the no triples rule: doubling a letter for emphasis, like writing "oo" in "moon", is fine, but a third same letter in a row, even across two words that touch, fails the last rule. Type the time last, count the length last, and read the whole password once before you call it done.
The 16 rules, in order
The rules arrive one at a time, and each one stays in force for the rest of the run. Here is the full list, in the order the game shows them.
- Some length first: 5 characters is the floor.
- Sneak at least one digit in there.
- Add a capital letter somewhere.
- Throw in a character that is not a letter or a digit.
- Add every digit together: the total has to be 25.
- Write in a month, any month of the year.
- Include a Roman numeral somewhere in the mix.
- Name a country, any country, and spell it out.
- Multiply all the Roman numerals together: the answer has to be 35.
- Copy in tonight's moon phase emoji, exactly as shown.
- Type in the captcha, exactly as printed.
- Add the time right now.
- Count the whole thing: the total length has to be a prime number.
- Add the symbol for the element whose atomic number is today's date.
- Pick exactly 2 emojis from the set shown, no more, no fewer.
- No character is allowed to show up 3 times in a row.
Save the hard rules for last
Rules 10 to 13 are the ones that expire or shift under you: the moon phase changes with the date, the captcha is fixed but easy to mistype, the time changes every minute, and the prime length moves every time you add a word. Do the stable rules first, the digits, the month, the country, the Roman numerals, and leave the time and the length check for the final minute. If you build in that order, the last stretch is a quick polish instead of a rebuild.