Halloween Season 2024

[Shark]

cool beans! am enjoying the games already.
uhm, one of them has me stumped though... master mind.
apparently, i haven't mastered mine. >>;;
joking aside, i'm not sure how to play it. i get that we type in text, but uhm, What text? are we looking for genetic codes n if so, how? maybe somebody knows how it works but i'm just not getting it... i don't understand what the directions are? i don't want cheat codes, i just need help even getting a basic idea of how to play. ^^;;

It's based on the Mastermind game, which often uses colored pegs instead of letters or numbers. But the general idea is the same! I wrote up a little guide on the Discord, so let me copy-paste that over...

Mastermind involves figuring out a four-count sequence (in this case, out of the letters ABCabc).

For example, if you type check ABab to start, it'll return some combo of _, 1, or 0.

_ means a letter is in the right spot, 1 means a letter is right but in the wrong spot, 0 means a letter is wrong. The response is always organized from _ to 0, so it doesn't give away which specific letter is correct/wrong.

You have a limited number of guesses to figure out the correct sequence. The difficulty can be changed from easy, medium, and hard. Hard mode changes the count for answers to six!

Bear in mind you need to type "check" before typing each new sequence you want to try; this is different from the old version we had in a previous holiday event (that code was lost, I think, so Cort redid the game from scratch with a new interface).

An example easy-mode game is shown below (copy-pasted because I struggle with images on the forums). Bold text explains my reasoning for an attempt.

Welcome Shark. Type 'help' to view all commands.

Shark@outpost42:~$ check AAAA (I personally like to start out with one or two letters at a time)

0 0 0 0 (No _ or 1, so I know A does not appear in the answer)

Try again. 8 remaining attempts.

Shark@outpost42:~$ check BBCC (Now I'm checking the other two capital options)

_ 0 0 0 (Only one letter in the right place, so I know either B or C is in the answer once)

Try again. 7 remaining attempts.

Shark@outpost42:~$ check aabb (Now I start checking the lowercase letters)

1 1 0 0 (the answer has either aa, bb, or ab in some combination. Also, they won't appear in the positions I just tested, which means there can't be a triple of one letter, or a 1 would have been _.)

Try again. 6 remaining attempts.

Shark@outpost42:~$ check cccc (checking the last lowercase letter)

_ 0 0 0 (there is a single c in the answer. I COULD have come to that conclusion without testing because of previous answers--no A, only one B or C, two letters from a/b, and since there can't be a triple of a/b, then the last letter must be c.)

Try again. 5 remaining attempts.

Shark@outpost42:~$ check Bbac (Now I'm testing to see if it's B or C and whether it's ab/aa/bb. aa or bb will return a 0, and the wrong B/C will return a zero. I also changed the positions of b and a to see if I might get an _ from that as well.)

1 1 1 1  (I lucked out, I now know all the letters! If it had returned a zero, I would have tried bcCa to see if it was a C instead of a B, and then gone from there.)

Try again. 4 remaining attempts.

Shark@outpost42:~$ check bBca (I already tried B in the first space, and since I know B was a correctly positioned letter from its first test now, I now know it must be in the second space. b can't be in the third or fourth space since it originally returned a 1, so it must be in the first place by process of elimination. In that case, c and a must be flipped from my last attempt, since they also returned a 1, meaning c is in the third place and a is in the fourth place.)

You won!

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I'm not the best player at this (I don't go anywhere near hard mode, haha), but it's a fun little logic puzzle, and hopefully this walk-through helps clarify things a bit!