The Chancellery's Rules
You are a Royal Investigator. Each day, the Chancellery entrusts you with a case file: a theft, a poisoning, a spy slipped into the court, a forged decree, a disappearance, a conspiracy. You have suspects, places, objects, and — in the harder case files — motives and hours of the day. Your task: to discover who the culprit is and everything connected to them, then to cast the verdict. Each case has a single solution, proven in advance — it is not guessed, it is deduced.
1. Read the Case File
Every suspect, place, object, motive, or moment has a description. The clues refer back to these descriptions — sometimes to a suspect's particular traits (height, hand, eyes, hair), sometimes to a place's description ("the place that smells of hay"). Everything you need is right in front of you; nothing is hidden, and nothing needs to be memorized.
2. The Supreme Law
The culprit always lies. Everyone else tells the truth.
When two testimonies contradict each other, one of the witnesses has something to hide. There is a single lie — the culprit's — and the rest of the clues lead you straight to them.
3. Fill In the Grid
The deduction grid is a table where every pair of categories meets exactly once. Tap a cell to mark it: blank → ✗ (excluded) → ✓ (certain) → blank. Every certain match automatically clears the rest of its row and column — that is how the net tightens. The grid is only your working notebook; your progress saves itself.
4. Cast the Verdict
Casting the verdict means naming the culprit and, for them, one element from every other category (where, with what, for what reason, at what hour). It is correct only if all the matches agree with the solution.
You have three attempts per case file. After a correct verdict — or after the third mistake — the case closes and you receive the full solution together with the step-by-step reasoning.
5. Scoring
You receive points only on a correct verdict. Hard cases pay far more than easy ones, so you cannot climb the leaderboard by grinding nothing but simple case files:
- Tier I — 100 points
- Tier II — 250 points
- Tier III — 500 points
- Tier IV — 1000 points (a Tier IV case = ten Tier I cases)
From this base score, penalties are subtracted:
- −15% for every prior wrong attempt (the 2nd attempt −15%, the 3rd −30%);
- −10% for every clue requested free (see below how to avoid the penalty).
Example: a Tier III case file (500), solved on the second attempt, with one free clue → 500 × (1 − 0.15 − 0.10) = 375 points. The score never drops below 0.
6. The Clues
If you get stuck, you may reveal up to three progressive clues — each brings a NEW detail the displayed clues do not state: the first gives you a sure elimination, the second whispers one innocent's match, and the third — the strongest — clears an innocent from the inquiry on Tiers I–II, while on Tiers III–IV it reveals a fact about the culprit (never their name). You have two paths:
- Free — the clue appears at once, but cuts 10% from your score.
- With scrolls — you pay for the clue out of your stipend, and it no longer penalizes your score. The cost rises with difficulty: 15 / 20 / 25 / 30 scrolls per tier (I–IV).
7. The Investigator's Stipend
For every day you return to the Chancellery, you receive your stipend — scrolls gathered on a repeating seven-day grid:
- Day 1: 5 · Day 2: 10 · Day 3: 15 · Day 4: 20 · Day 5: 30 · Day 6: 40 · Day 7: 80
- A full week, without a single break, brings you 200 scrolls.
You collect the stipend once a day, from the home page. If you skip a day, the grid resets to Day 1 — consistency is rewarded. Scrolls are used to pay for clues without penalty, and they do not count toward the leaderboard (you cannot buy a top spot).
8. The Daily Streak and Rank
Only a correctly solved case of the day counts toward the daily streak. Each consecutive day adds +1; a break resets the streak to 1, but your record remains on the books. The case files in Mysteries & Intrigues can be played anytime — and their score counts toward the leaderboard.
Rank rises with the number of distinct cases solved:
- Apprentice (0) → Scribe (5) → Knight (15) → Royal Counselor (40) → Grand Inquisitor (100 cases)
9. Honors and the Leaderboard
Along the way you gather achievements — 21 medals for an investigator's deeds: long streaks, verdicts on the first try, cases solved without a single clue, Tier IV case files, and more. You can see them on your profile.
The leaderboard has three boards: weekly (the sum of scores from Monday through Sunday), monthly (the current calendar month) and all-time (your entire history in the archives). Every solved case counts — the case of the day and the mysteries of the archive alike; ties are broken by score, then by the shorter time.
10. You Can Also Play as a Guest
You can solve any case without an account: the grid and the verdict work the same way, only your progress stays on your own device, and the leaderboard shows you under a borrowed name (say, "the Keen Scout") that lasts for the visit. With an investigator account you keep your streak, rank, achievements, and stipend, and you enter the leaderboard under your own name and crest.