Grandpa's Lighthouse.
Grandpa keeps the lighthouse, and tonight he has left the lamp to you. Everything you need is in his room, behind six small locks he built for you to open.
Six locks, each a small puzzle with exactly one answer: a picture grid, signal flags, a cipher, counting, a pebble board and a sum plate. No time limit: the clock is only your score. We made it for families, to play together with a child or on your own.
Paused.
Grandpa's letter is on the table. Start there.
Settings
Sound starts on here, unlike in our daily puzzles, because in this room the locks answer in sound: a chime when one opens, Grandma's lantern when it blinks. It stays quiet and soft, and it is off for good once you untick it. Your progress, time and hints stay in this browser only. Start again clears them.
How it works.
One room, six locks, one lamp.
How to play
Tap or click anything in the room to look closer; Grandpa's letter on the table is the place to start. Each lock is a small puzzle. Solving it opens something, and what you find goes into your pocket.
Some locks need what another lock gave you, so they open in one order. When the last one opens, you climb the stairs and light the lamp, so Grandma's boat finds its way into the harbour.
The six locks
The sea chest has a picture grid: the numbers by each row and column tell how many cells in a row are filled. The signal line takes five flags in the order of Grandpa's rhyme. The logbook hides its word by moving letters along the alphabet. The cabinet has three dials, and something in the room tells you what to set.
The pebble board wants one pebble in every row, every column and every coloured patch, with no two pebbles touching, not even at a corner. The stair door has a sum plate: every row and column adds up to its number, and no digit appears twice in a row or a column.
Every lock has exactly one answer, and none of them needs a guess.
Hints
Hint answers in two steps, in the bar under the room. The first press says where to look and why. The second press does exactly one step for you: it fills a row, sets a wheel, places a pebble or writes a digit. When you are in the room rather than a puzzle, the second press lights up the thing to open next.
If a mark on a puzzle is wrong, the first hint says so and the second clears it. Hints are free and have no limit. One hint counts once, whether you stop after the first press or take the second too. At the end, a lock is marked as helped only when a hint helped with its puzzle; a hint that just shows you where to go counts in your total, not against a lock.
Controls
Keyboard: Tab moves between the things in the room, Enter or Space opens one, Esc goes back to the room.
In the picture grid and on the pebble board, arrows move and Space cycles a cell. On the letter wheels and the dials, up and down arrows turn, left and right arrows move, and you can simply type the letter or digit. On the sum plate, arrows move and digits write. On the signal line, Enter picks up a flag, arrows carry it and Enter puts it down.
The picture grid, the pebble board and the sum plate have Undo and Redo, as in our daily puzzles: U or Ctrl+Z undoes, R or Ctrl+Y redoes, and Clear can be undone too.
Your progress
Everything is saved in this browser as you go: open locks, your pocket, half finished puzzles, time and hints. Close the page and come back later.
The clock runs only while you play. It stops when you leave the tab or do nothing for a minute, and Pause stops it too. Settings has Start again.
About this game.
Grandpa's Lighthouse is a small escape room we made for arling.sk, in the family of our daily logic puzzles. Every drawing is made in code right in your browser, and every sound is synthesised there too: no photo, no recording, no picture generator.
Each lock has exactly one answer, and we check that with a program that tries every possibility: all 33,554,432 ways to fill the picture grid, all 120 flag orders, all 11,881,376 five letter words, all 1,000 dial settings and all 53,130 ways to put five pebbles on the board. The same program walks the whole way to the lamp and makes sure no lock can be skipped.
Your progress is stored only in this browser. Our anonymous statistics (self-hosted Umami) record the page visit, as on every page of ours, and a few game events: that someone started, opened a lock, asked for a hint, changed a setting, shared the result or lit the lamp, with which lock or setting it was, the time and the number of hints. They also count which of our links on this page was clicked. They never record your answers or the marks you make in a puzzle. Ideas or trouble: support@arling.sk.