The Password Games

Type a password. The Committee responds with a directive: a rule your password must satisfy. Meet it, and another appears. Every rule stays in force at once, so a fix for Directive 12 can quietly break Directive 8, which floats back to the top stamped DENIED until you deal with it.

The early rules parody real password forms. The middle rules want math, geography, and live data. The late rules give your password a houseplant with opinions, an outbreak to contain, and a Committee that demands sacrifices. The final directive seals the vault.

The difficulty does not come from any single rule. It comes from holding all of them at once. Directive 6 wants a prime number of characters, Directive 21 wants a Scrabble score of exactly 138, and Directive 28 caps your length just as you were about to pad your way out of trouble. Satisfy one and you break two. That is the whole game.

Stuck on a directive? Every rule has a guide with hints and answers, from a gentle nudge to the full solution.

Neal Agarwal's The Password Game arrived in 2023 and invented a genre: one input box, one password, and a stack of rules that turn a login form into a boss fight. Millions of people finished it, then went looking for a Password Game 2 that was never made.

The Password Games is that second helping, built from scratch. Every one of the thirty directives here is original. There is no chess puzzle, no periodic table, no sponsor to name and no Wordle answer to look up. Instead you get a magic square with a missing cell, a Scrabble target, an exiled digit and an exiled letter you can never use again, a houseplant called Fern who needs watering on a timer, an outbreak that multiplies every six seconds until you sanitise it, and a vault cipher standing between you and the end. Knowing the original inside out will not spoil a single answer here.

Three structural things are also different. There is a daily challenge with one seed for the whole world, so your time is comparable with everyone else's. There is a three-minute Blitz for people who want the first twelve rules and nothing else. And when a late rule kills your run, you resume from the start of the current act rather than from Directive 1.

The whole game is one static page. No download, no installer, no sign-up, no account, no Flash and no Unity plugin. That is why it usually loads on school and office networks that block the big game portals: there is no game portal to block, just a web page. The unblocked guide explains what to do if your network still gets in the way.

It is genuinely free and there is no paid tier. Your run saves to your own browser, so you can close the tab mid-crisis and pick the same password back up tomorrow. Nothing you type is ever sent to a server, which is enforced by the site's security policy rather than merely promised: see the privacy policy for the specifics.

On a phone the password box stays above your keyboard and a tap strip inserts the emoji the rules demand, so you are never fighting your own emoji picker while Fern dies of thirst.

All thirty directives have their own guide, each written so the hint comes first and the full answer sits further down. Popular ones: Directive 5, day of the week, Directive 9, the arithmetic answer, Directive 12, the landlocked country, Directive 13, the magic square, Directive 14, the rhyme and Directive 30, the vault code. If you would rather not be told, the strategy guide teaches the method without spoiling individual answers.

Playing the original neal.fun game instead? We keep a separate set of password game help pages for its rules, including how to beat the password game, the chess move in algebraic notation, the two-letter periodic table symbols, the Wordle answer rule, the digits that add up to 25 and the YouTube video length. The solver suite does the arithmetic for the digit, Roman numeral and atomic number rules.