Treasure Code Gameplay Examples: Level 3

Level 3!

This is a fun level that gives your mind a little exercise in logical reasoning. For those who don't know, as the name implies, level 3 involves having to guess the combination of 3 gems. With 6 possible colors and repeating gems that means there are 6*6*6 = 216 possible combinations.

The starting screen for Level 3 looks like this.

As you can see, you begin with three colors suggested for you: red, orange, yellow or [r,o,y].

I have found that it is a very good first guess to "span the colors" in your first guess to get an idea of what colors are in the combination, and if there are any duplicates.
There is no right or wrong way to use your first guess, of course!

[r,o,y]  yielded a skull and crossbones. This means
the combination can't have red, orange or yellow

Here I got a skull and crossbones for my first guess, meaning none of the gems are in the combination. At first, that might seem like a bad thing, since your guess was way off. However, this actually tells you a lot because you now definitely know the combination does not have red, orange or yellow in it.
In math terms, you have reduced your "solution space" from 6*6*6 = 216 to 3*3*3 = 27 possibilities!

So, now that we know we're looking for a combination of green, teal and blue gems, we could try green, teal, teal, i.e. [g,t,t].

The result was [X,/], a strike and a spare. The strike means we got one color in the right spot, and one color in the wrong spot.

There is a lot you can learn from this result as well! The first thing I notice is that teal has to be in the solution. How?
The green gem can only either be the spare or the strike, but it can't be both! So whatever the green gem was, one of the teal gems had to account for the remaining spare or strike (or both if green is not in the combination).

For advanced players, a more subtle piece of information is apparent. The result tells us that the solution can't begin with green, e.g. it can't be [g,x,x]. How can one figure that?
Start by assuming the solution does begin with green. Then the strike would have come from the green gem. So then one of the teals would be the spare, right? If the teal gems in the second and third spot are not strikes, then teal should be in the first spot. But... that's the spot you assumed green to be in! So green can't be there!

There are still many guesses we can make from here. I decided to guess: [t,g,g] since:
a) we know green is not in the first position
b) we know teal is in the combination
c) I want to check if green is in the combination

As you can see, we got a single strike. Because we determined earlier that teal is in the combination, the one and only strike has to correspond to the teal gem. This also means we know the combination starts with teal, e.g. [t,x,x]

Since it's sometimes hard to keep all this information in our head, we can use the Treasure Code's features to jot down some notes (this especially helps if you save the game and need to come back to it later).

In the game's menu, there are two options that can help: Exclude Choices, and Solution Notes.

In the following screenshots, I demonstrate how I go about excluding the green gem and marking the teal gem in the first position as being part of the solution.

I exclude the green gem using the Exclude Choices dialog box and scrolling up on the green gem. Similarly I select the teal gem in the first position using the Solution Notes dialog box.

We could do the same for red, orange and yellow, but at this point we're almost there, and the notes are for you: they are not required to win the game.

Returning to the game, we know so far that the solution starts with teal and that green is not there. Before we proceed with our next guess, let's take a moment to look back at our previous guesses now that we have a little more information. It sometimes pays to look back to earlier guesses: in this case, our second guess definitely can give us a little more information this time around:

1. There have to be at least two teal gems in the combination, to account for the spare and the strike, since there is no green.
2. We know it can't be purely teal, or else there would have been two strikes, so [t,t,t] can be ruled out.


Since the only other color we haven't tried is blue, we know blue has to be in the combination, and that there is only one. That narrows the solution space down to only two options: [t,b,t] or [t,t,b].

If you followed this line of reasoning, congratulations! It takes some getting used to.

The remaining guesses are really just to see which of the two possibilities it is. And we have plenty of guesses (5) remaining!

Let's try [t,b,t]...

Looks like that one wasn't it. But it confirms our suspicion! [t,b,t] gave a strike and two spares. The blue in the second spot is wrong, and the teal in the 3rd is wrong, which would indicate they're swapped, just as we expect.

For completion, let's verify the solution is indeed [t,t,b]...

Whew, that would have been embarrassing if it wasn't right...

I hope this walkthrough was helpful, feedback is always encouraged. Thank you for reading!