Tonight's four

Which of the four to open first

They look like variations on each other and they are not. The thing that separates them is how much you are allowed to know before you commit, and that single dial changes what kind of thinking each one asks for.

The Long Way Down shows you everything. Five scenes, three doors each, and all five dice thrown and printed before you touch anything. There is no luck left in it at all: it is an assignment problem, and the only question is which die you are willing to waste on which door. It is the one that rewards knowing the rules, because the two that decide it are stated and easy to skip. Dread doubles every cost once it reaches three, so an early cheap failure and a late cheap failure are not the same price. And a natural 1 always fails while a natural 20 always clears, whatever the arithmetic says, so the die you are looking at may be worth more or less than the number on it.

The Deep Run is the long one, and the only one where you do not know the number before you choose. You build a character first, then take them down six floors, and each room owns its die: you see it when you are standing in the room and not a moment earlier. Every floor has one way through that always works and always costs, so a bad build is a slow bleed rather than a wall. Budget five minutes rather than two, and expect to not come back the first few times.

The Ledger has no dice in it anywhere. Five drinkers, five debts, and four statements that are all true. It is scored out of four, and every check you spend against the ledger takes one of those four off, so a clean four means you worked it out and asked for nothing. It is the one to send somebody who says they do not like this sort of game, because it is a logic grid with a pub in it.

Muster is character creation as the whole game. Tonight's six numbers, rolled once for the world, one Calling and one piece of Kit, then five doors that were chosen for you. Out of five, and the day is drawn so that par is never five, because a set of doors any sensible build clears is not a puzzle. Everything you needed to know was on the sheet before you pressed anything, which is either the most satisfying two minutes of the four or the most annoying.

The reset, and what a streak actually counts

The day rolls over at midnight UTC, not at midnight where you are. In British summer time that is one in the morning, so a puzzle opened late on a Tuesday evening is still Tuesday's. Everything is a pure function of that date: the same date produces the same dice, the same drinkers and the same six numbers for everybody alive, and nothing is stored anywhere to make that true. It falls out of the seed.

A streak counts one thing only, and it is narrower than most sites make it: a puzzle played on its own date. The archive is deliberately open, all the way back, and everything in it is practice. Play three weeks of back days this afternoon and your streak stays exactly where it was, because a streak that can be farmed in ten minutes is not measuring anything. It is per puzzle, too, so a Ledger streak and a Deep Run streak are separate animals and missing one does not cost you the other.

Three of the four publish a par, and par here is the best score that was achievable, found by brute force rather than estimated: the solver walks every legal line through tonight's puzzle and reports the top of it. That is why the golf convention is upside down and the results screen says "two short of par" rather than two over. You cannot beat par. You can only find out how much of it was there.

The same solver is what checks a dungeon you write yourself, and the rules underneath all four are the ones the multiplayer game runs on. Nothing here is a spin-off with its own maths.