Flash Point: Fire Rescue and The Resistance studio reveals co-op game Crack the Code

Work together to protect an online network from enemy hackers in Crack the Code, an upcoming game from Indie Boards & Games - the studio responsible for Flash Point: Fire Rescue and The Resistance: Avalon.

Crack the Code is a co-op board game for one to four players that sees players becoming master hackers attempting to stop a malicious attack on their program. The players must race against time to secure their network before the firewall is breached and the program is irrevocably corrupted. To do this, the players need to cooperate with each to discover what the network code is by issuing commands to move data packets - represented by marbles - around to form the right patterns.

At the start of the game, each player receives a terminal tray containing a set of marbles and a goal card: the pattern that the players are trying to form in their trays. A number of command cards are drawn equal to the current player count plus one, which players can then use to move the marbles in their allies’ trays around. Each round, players can choose to use one of the command cards shown, which are discarded at the end of that round.

Crucially, players can only see the marbles in the game-controlled hackers’ trays and not those in their own, meaning that their commands are only relevant to their allies’ marbles. Players cannot tell each other what coloured marbles are in what order in their tray. Instead, they must select the commands they think are going to help form the pattern listed on the other players’ goal cards. Should the players form every pattern on all the goal cards shown, they win the game. However, if the command cards run out before they complete their goal cards, they all lose.

Crack the Code was designed by Sarah Graybill and John Shulters, the co-creators of abstract strategy game Grackles - which has players lining up tokens to represent birds perching on a telephone line - and family game Rocket Squad.

Besides Crack the Code and Avalon, Indie Boards & Games is known for publishing hidden role game Coup, which has players competing against one another for control over a dystopian future government in the same sci-fi universe as The Resistance, and co-op firefighting game Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

The Kickstarter campaign for Crack the Code is live until November 22nd, with a pledge of $24 (£19) getting backers a copy of the core game set to arrive next March.