Keys and locks

A door that is worth walking to

The oldest structure in adventure games is the locked door: you cannot go through it yet, you know roughly what it will take, and everything you do in the meantime is coloured by it. It works because the goal is specific. Collect three things is a chore; collect two iron keys because the cellar door needs two iron keys is a plan.

This is that door with the awkward part done for you. The lock lists what it needs, the screen counts what is held, and the moment the set is complete it opens and reads out what you wrote inside. Before that, the line under the lock says exactly how far off it is, which keeps a treasure hunt honest without a host having to referee every claim.

Escape rooms and treasure hunts

The reveal text is the part that makes this an escape room rather than a counter. Put the next clue behind a lock, or the combination for a real box, or the location of the thing everybody is looking for, and the screen becomes the gate between one stage and the next. Keys are awarded for whatever you like: a puzzle solved, a task finished, a question answered correctly by a group.

Pooling is the setting to think about before you start. Pooled makes the whole room one team, which is what you want for a class or a party where nobody should be stuck. One player at a time makes keys worth trading, which is what you want when the game is about negotiation. Both are one tap apart, so it is easy to loosen the rule halfway through when a group is genuinely stuck.

Held, not spent

A lock reads what is held rather than taking it, so a key can open two doors and a lock can be shut again with nothing to refund. That is a deliberate difference from a resource game: if you want keys to be spent, the inventory tray is the page that moves things around and the crafting table is the one that consumes them.

For a box that opens on a code rather than a set of keys, or on nothing more than the host deciding, the set collection board is the nearest page here today. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses, and nothing you type reaches a link.

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