Challenge a Friend: New Challenge Links and Usernames
Crack a vault, tap Share, and your friends get the exact same questions and one shot to beat your time. Plus usernames, Free vs Pro in one place, and 300 questions in a better order.
The Crack the Vault crew ·
Here is a thing we noticed. When you crack a vault, the first thing you want to do is tell someone. And the first thing they ask is, "Okay, but was that hard?"
Until now you couldn't prove it. Every run of Crack the Vault shuffles the questions, so your 1:42 and your friend's 1:42 weren't really the same race. This week we fixed that.
Challenge links
Crack any vault and tap Share. The game turns your run into a link:
I cracked The Casino Cage in 1:42, rank Ghost. Same questions, one shot. 🟩🟩🟨🟩🟩 Beat me: vaultbreak.games/c/...
Whoever opens that link plays the exact questions you got, in the same order, under the same clock. They get one shot. No retries, no peeking at the answers, no "let me try again". When they finish, the page tells them whether they beat you, by how many seconds, and where they landed among everyone else who took the challenge.
A few things we care about:
- One link works for a whole group chat. Drop it in your WhatsApp group and the results page ranks everyone who plays.
- Nobody needs an account to take a challenge. Guests just type a name to show on the results.
- Pro vaults are free to play through a challenge. If your friend hasn't unlocked Vaults 4 to 10, they can still take you on at the hardest safe you cracked.
- Challenges never touch your progress. They don't change your vault map, your ranks or your best times. It's a side door, and it's just for bragging.
- The link shows the vault. Paste it anywhere and the preview is a picture of the safe you cracked, with your time in the title.
The grid of green and yellow squares works like the one in Wordle. Green means you solved a lock clean, yellow means you needed a hint or a second try. It tells your friends how the run went without spoiling a single answer.
If you haven't cracked anything yet, start with Vault 1. It needs no sign-up and takes a few minutes. Then send the link to the friend who always says puzzles are easy.
Your own name
Challenges got a lot more fun once they had names attached, so every account now has a username.
You pick it when you sign up. As you type, the game checks in real time whether it's free, and if you're stuck there's a Suggest one button that hands you a heist-style name like SilentLockpick42. Names are 3 to 16 characters, and nobody else can take yours, capital letters included.
You can change it later from your Account page, once every 30 days. Your email address is never shown anywhere, only the name you chose. If you signed up before this existed, we gave you a random name, and you can swap it for a real one straight away.
Free, Pro and answers in one place
A lot of people asked the same few things, so the home page now has a simple section called "Free to start. $1 to finish."
Vaults 1 and 2 are free with no sign-up. Vault 3 is free with an account. Vaults 4 to 10 are Pro, a single $1 payment with no subscription and nothing to cancel. You can buy it right from that section without playing first, and the FAQ underneath covers accounts, what happens when the alarm trips, and whether it works on your phone. (It does.)
If you're curious why we price it like this, and why a paid puzzle game is a different thing from a real-money one, we wrote a whole post about it.
300 questions, in a better order
The game now has 300 questions across the ten vaults, and we went through every one of them and sorted by difficulty. Vault 1 eases you in. By the time you reach the Masterpiece vault, the locks have stopped being polite. Each vault should feel harder than the one before, without any sudden walls.
If you ever hit a riddle that felt unfair, or one with an answer that should have counted, tell us. Every riddle keeps a list of accepted answers, and adding one takes us a minute.
What's next
We're working on public leaderboards and more vaults. The long-term goal is a hundred of them, so there will always be a safe nobody you know has cracked yet. If you want to see where this came from, read where we think puzzle gaming in India is headed or the about page.
For now, go crack something and send it to someone. Then tell us who won.