Password Game

The Password Game starts with one rule — the password must be at least 8 characters long — and gets meaner every time you succeed. Satisfy the rules you currently have and, half a second later, a new one appears. There are twelve in total, and the last one asks for 20 characters.

It is a joke about how password requirements escalate, and the punchline is that by the end you have to satisfy rules that were never individually unreasonable but are collectively absurd.

How to Play

1. Type into the password field. Rules are checked as you type — there is no submit button.
2. When a rule is satisfied its marker flips to a checkmark and its hint is revealed, so you never have to guess what it wanted.
3. Once every current rule is satisfied, the next rule is added shortly after. Keep going.
4. A strength bar tracks your progress: red below 33%, amber below 66%, green above. It fills as a fraction of all twelve rules, not of the ones currently shown.
5. Satisfy all twelve and you get a Congratulations! screen showing your final password. Play Again resets everything.

Controls

• Type in the password field — the entire game. All checks happen on input events; there are no keyboard shortcuts, no Enter to confirm, and nothing to press
• Play Again button — only appears on the win screen, and it re-enables the field and starts from rule one

There is no submit, no timer and no fail state. You cannot lose — you can only take as long as you want.

The Twelve Rules

In the order the game applies them:

1. At least 8 characters long
2. At least one uppercase letter
3. At least one lowercase letter
4. At least one number
5. At least one special character from !@#$%^&*
6. No spaces
7. At least one emoji
8. Contains a palindrome — reads the same forwards and backwards
9. Contains a Roman numeral (I, V, X, L, C, D, M)
10. Contains a chemical element symbol (H, He, Li, Be, B, C, N, O, F, Ne, Na, Mg, Al, Si, P, S, Cl, Ar, K, Ca)
11. Contains leet speak — at least one of a/A e/E i/I o/O and at least one of 4 3 1 0
12. At least 20 characters long

Tips

• The palindrome check is cleverer than it looks. It strips everything that is not a letter or digit, then searches any substring of length three or more for a match against its own reverse. You do not need a whole word like racecar — any three identical characters in a row works, so aaa satisfies it. That is the intended trick and it saves a lot of trouble.
• Rule 11 needs two halves. Having a normal a and a 4 is not enough on its own — you need a letter from that set and a digit from 4310. Combining them in one token such as a4 satisfies both halves at once.
• Rule 10 accepts single letters, and that is a real trap. C, N and O are all valid element symbols, so it may already be satisfied by a word you were going to type anyway. Check the rule before contorting the password.
• Rule 9 collides with rule 10. C, I and M are both Roman numerals and element symbols, and C and I are also just letters you would use anyway.
• Plan the last rule early. Because rule 12 needs 20 characters and rules 5, 7 and 11 want extra characters anyway, build length as you go rather than padding at the end.

About

This is a self-contained page — markup, styles and logic in one file, with no framework, no build step and no external requests of any kind.

It implements the same escalating-rules format popularised by Neal Agarwal's Password Game on neal.fun, but the twelve rules here are this site's own selection and wording.

See public/games/password-game/ATTRIBUTION.md for the full provenance record.