Clue Stack
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The blueprint

Napkin to game night in five moves

This is the workflow Clue Stack is shaped around. It is how the operators in our beta already worked. We just stopped making them do it across four disconnected tools.

01

Map the room

Start with whatever you already have. A puzzle list, a floor sketch, a half finished doc. Drop each puzzle, prop and gate onto the canvas and give it a zone. Ten minutes gets a full room on the board.

  • Import from a spreadsheet or start blank
  • Zones, acts and reward states built in
  • Each node carries its solution, props and reset notes
02

Wire the logic

Connect the nodes into the real flow. Say what unlocks what, which paths are optional, which are red herrings and where a team can legitimately get stuck. This is the part that normally lives in one person's head.

  • AND, OR, timed and manual gates
  • Branches, optional paths and decoys
  • Checks run as you draw
03

Simulate before you build

Run the sequence against virtual teams. Find the flat twenty minutes, the puzzle that stops six teams in ten, and the branch nobody will ever reach, while it is all still cheap to change.

  • Solve time spread per team profile
  • Stall heat map across the sequence
  • Difficulty curve against your target run time
04

Playtest and annotate

Build it, run real groups and log everything. Every note pins to a puzzle, so the sticky drawer and the clue nobody looked up become permanent, findable facts about that room.

  • Session logging with timestamps
  • Friction tags attached to specific puzzles
  • Hint usage recorded automatically
05

Run and refine

Game masters open the console and work from your hint ladders instead of instinct. Analytics build up quietly and tell you when it is time to retune.

  • Live timer, puzzle states and hint delivery
  • Incident log for every run
  • Monthly difficulty drift report
Under the hood

How the logic checks actually think

Your room is stored as a directed graph. That one decision is what makes everything else possible.

Reachability

Every puzzle is checked for at least one valid route from the room start. No route means no publish.

Deadlock detection

Puzzle A needs a key from puzzle B which needs a key from puzzle A. Caught the moment the second link is drawn.

Simulated teams

Thousands of runs with randomised skill, curiosity and hint tolerance produce a spread of outcomes rather than a single guess.

Five moves, one evening

Most beta operators have their first room fully modelled before they finish a coffee. The hard part was always the logic and you already did that part.

Start with one room