Finding the code
The idea of the game is to guess the combination of colours in a four part code. The code can be made up of any combination of seven different colours: red, green, blue, yellow, black, white and pink - and just to make things a little more tricky, the same colour can appear more than once. You get twelve attempts to guess the code, and if you haven't found it by then, we'll put you out of your misery and tell you what it was.
From your user page, click the "play" link next to a game. Don't have any games waiting? No problem - just click "request a solo game", and we'll set you up with a random code to guess.
To make your first guess, choose which colours you'd like to try. There's no right or wrong way to pick the colours, though after you've played a few games, you might start to develop your own strategy. When you think you've picked a good set of colours, press "submit" and we'll store that as your first guess. Unless you're very lucky, you won't get it on your first guess, but we'll help you out by giving you some feedback each time you make a guess.
Let's say that your first guess is green-red-blue-yellow. After clicking submit, you'll see something resembling the image to the right.
A small white marker means that you have a colour correct but it's in the wrong position. A small black marker tells you that you have a correct colour in the right place. This is a good thing - when you have four of these small black markers, it means that you've guessed the code! The bad news is that there's no way to know which part of your guess the feedback markers refer to - that'd make things too easy. In this case, there's one colour in the right place, one colour in the wrong place, and two of the wrong colours.
OK, let's try to improve on that - we'll guess blue-blue-pink-pink (remember that the code can have colours appear more than once). That's got one colour in the right place, but that's it. It might seem like a step backwards, but it gives us something to work with - there's either a blue on the left, or a pink on the right. Unfortunately, we're going to need a bit more information before we can work the code out for sure. We'd better make a few more guesses...
So, what have we got here, then? Well, guess three tells us that there's a black, white or red in there (and whichever one it is must be in the right place). That's useful, but there's still not really enough to go on. Guess four initially looks like a waste of time, but it's actually really useful - rather than not telling us anything, it tells us that there's no red or blue in the code.
This is great stuff - it means that the two colours that we need from guess one are green and yellow, the right colour in guess two is one of the pinks, and that the final colour (from guess three) is either black or white. Green, yellow, pink, and then black or white. Time to make another guess...
We're not sure whether the code contains a white or a black, so we'll just have to guess - let's go for yellow-black-green-pink. The feedback for that is one colour in the right place, two colours in the wrong place. OK, straight away we can see that we've only got three of the right colours, so we should have gone for white instead of black. Looking at guess three, we can see that the feedback must apply to the white, meaning that it must go in position three. From guess two, we know that the pink has to be in position three or four (as that would give us one black feedback marker). Well, we know that the white is in position three, so the pink must be in position four.
That just leaves the yellow and green to sort out. Try to use the previous guesses and feedback to work out which way round they go - the solution is on the next page.