After trying my hand at the first scenario i bashed my head in with the code puzzle, after about 45 tries i put it all away in the box. Today i was brave enough to dig it out and try it again...and also i got some clear bases off ebay to try out too.

Well I won....!! it was down to the wire as they say.... i had 2 investigators - carson sinclair and agatha crane (blind picks ) what a pair of old gits :-)

We only had the one puzzle, the sliding one which is standard i guess for the story, but no more ? I wonder if the APP knew i sucked at them ?

I look forward to playing it again and finding out what changes appear second time around..

As for my investigators story it went like this... No spoilers....

The tale of horror...........

Carson sinclair a retired butler contacted agatha crane to seek out the strange going on at the mansion where he work but was sacked shortly after. After moving though the house with haste we dealt with the problem and got chased by a large monster, carson got hit a couple of times trying to get past it and got knocked though the air and landed in the direction he needed to head to. he picked himself up and rushed badly wounded to the front door. Ahead of him was agatha, she was also in a bad way.

Agatha both wounded and insane...poor cow even had 4 mental health problems too, so if she was not running for the front door, then she was headed to the nut house. she was only one movement space away from the front door holding the information the police needed to see when she dropped her candles and flames lite up the house in fire...including herself. reaching blindly, burning clothes and skin she grabbed the door handles and burst forward into the night.... behind her somewhere carson was being chased by a bloody large beast and a hallway of fire in front of him... i guess he was in trouble... ( as soon as a investigator leaves the house it was a win and game over. but looking back i feel he could have escaped also, but i say he did not...... "its so hard to find a good butler these days you know"....

I enjoyed it very much.....

Alan

That code puzzle is based off a game from the 70's called Mastermind. As you can imagine it was popular with mathematicians and they discovered a few tricks for solving it. If your interested check out http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Mastermind.htmlon some techniques.

I never really liked Mastermind as a child. Now I practised a bit on a Mastermind game found online and came up with a pretty good strategy that works for me. It can usually solve the puzzle in 5 steps, sometimes 4, sometimes it takes a few guesses more. That is good enough for us without going overly mathematical.

A buddy of mine went through 16 attempts on one of those color puzzles. He gave up and I solved it in two. His complaint was that he though the app showed the order in which the color was correct or it was in the correct position, not that it just showed overall how many correct guesses or positions you had. I was happy with my self that i figured the correct positioning out by the 3rd overall guess when he guessed all the right colors but had some in the wrong positions.

^ it really helps to read and understand the mechanics of each puzzle. The example in the Learning To Play guide have been helpful for our gaming groups so far.