Daily Brains · a digital treasure hunt: search the web, follow the Archivist's trail, open the vault.
Daily Quest is the treasure-hunt puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Every day a mysterious Archivist leaves a case file with a trail of 3 to 5 leads. Each lead is a question whose answer is a real, long-settled fact (a year, a city, a composer, a chemical symbol) that you find by searching the internet. Each answer unlocks the next lead, and at the end your answers spell the code that opens the vault.
STORY & LORE
The Archivist
Nobody knows who the Archivist is. Their cards turn up in library books, on microfilm reels and in unstamped parcels, always typed on the same machine and signed "A.". The Archivist only deals in facts that have stayed true for a long time: publication years of classic books, former names of cities, Olympic host cities, the periodic table, Roman numerals. Nothing that changes, and nothing about living people.
The case files
The bank holds 1,020 hand-checked facts in 24 kinds (capitals, chemical symbols and atomic numbers, elements named after places and people, book authors and first-publication years, composers, painters, former city and country names, rivers, Greek and Norse myth, Olympic hosts, famous years, museum foundings, stars and constellations, SI units, the NATO and Greek alphabets, and Roman-numeral and binary decoding). Each fact has a gentle, medium or hard rating, and every player gets the same case file each day. No whole case ever repeats, and no single fact comes back for months.
HOW IT PLAYS
Leads and answers
Read the lead, search for the answer, type it into the terminal and press Enter. Spelling is forgiving: capitals, accents, spaces, punctuation and a leading "the" are ignored, and common alternative spellings are accepted (Dostoevsky or Dostoyevsky, Mumbai's old name Bombay, and so on). Wrong answers cost nothing but time. Answers are stored only as hashes, so the page source does not give them away.
Nudges and burning a lead
Stuck? A 💡 Nudge tells you what to search for ("Search: capital city of Bhutan"), never the answer itself, and halves that lead's points. 🔥 Burn lead gives the lead up: the answer is revealed so you can carry on to the vault, but the lead scores nothing.
The vault
After the last lead, the vault shows your answers and a combination rule, such as the first letter or digit of each answer, the last one, the second or third, or (on Sunday) the last ones read backwards. Type the code to open the vault and solve the case. If you give up at the vault the case goes cold, which breaks your streak.
The weekly ramp
Monday is 3 gentle leads. Tuesday is 3, then 4 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, rising in difficulty. Saturday has 5 leads, and one of them comes as two cards, one of them forged; the rule tells you whether the genuine answer is longer or shorter than the forger's. Sunday has 5 hard leads, a forged card and an encrypted lead in a Caesar cipher. The shift is the number of letters and digits in your previous answer.
Scoring
Out of 1,000: 600 split evenly across the leads (half for a nudged lead, none for a burned one), 200 for opening the vault, and up to 200 for speed. The clock only runs while the file is open and on screen. You get the full speed bonus up to the day's par time (6 minutes on Monday, 30 on Sunday), and it fades to nothing at three times par. A perfect day means every lead solved with no nudges.
Sharing
The share line shows the puzzle number, hops solved, nudges used, your time and one square per lead (🟩 solved, 🟨 nudged, 🟥 burned) plus 🔓 or 🔒 for the vault. It never shows the answers.
THE WEEK
| Day | Leads | Twist | Vault rule | Par |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday · Gentle | 3 gentle | None | First letter/digit | 6 min |
| Tuesday · Easy | 2 gentle + 1 medium | None | First letter/digit | 8 min |
| Wednesday · Steady | 1 gentle + 3 medium | None | Last letter/digit | 12 min |
| Thursday · Tricky | 1 gentle + 3 medium | None | Second letter/digit | 14 min |
| Friday · Devious | 3 medium + 1 hard | None | Second letter/digit | 18 min |
| Saturday · Wicked | 3 medium + 2 hard | One forged lead | Third letter/digit | 24 min |
| Sunday · Fiendish | 2 medium + 3 hard | Forged lead + Caesar cipher | Last letters, reversed | 30 min |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Open the vault | 15 Tickets |
| Perfect day (every lead, no nudges) | +25 Tickets |
| Dead Drop (first vault) | 📬 Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Clean Trail (a perfect day) | 🕵️ Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Night Shift (3-day streak) | 🔦 Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Field Agent (7-day streak) | 🗂️ Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Keeper of the Stacks (30-day streak) | 🏛️ Legendary · 100 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch with the Daily Brains section: a 1,020-fact bank, 3–5 leads a day and a weekday difficulty ramp from Gentle to Fiendish.
- Forged leads on the weekend and a Caesar-cipher lead on Sunday.
- Hashed answers, nudges, burning a lead, the vault code, the speed bonus, streaks, the statistics sheet and the share line.