Directive 14: Rhymes With Key (Hints & Answer)

Hint first (no full spoiler): The Committee wants a word that rhymes with key. Two accepted answers contain no letter e at all: one involves snow, the other a harbour.

Directive 14 requires your password to contain a word that rhymes with “key”. The Vault Security Committee maintains an approved rhyming registry. “Quay” was added to it after a lengthy appeal and the Committee is not taking further suggestions.

The full solution

Include any one of these words, case-insensitive:

bee, fee, flee, free, glee, knee, pea, plea, quay, sea, see, ski, spree, tea, three, tree, agree, decree, degree

The cheapest picks are the 3-letter words: pea, sea, tea, and ski. Example fragments that pass: chad-ski-1221, tea3nepal, Fern44sea!.

But two of these words are not like the others. Ski and quay are the only entries on the list with no letter “e”. Every other option carries at least one, and decree and degree carry three. That makes ski the strategic answer as well as the short one: take ski unless you have a reason not to. Quay is the fallback, one letter longer and carrying a q worth 10 under Directive 21, but it shares no letter with ski, so Directive 25 can never strip both e-free options at once.

Note that the word just has to appear as a contiguous string. If you already typed spree for style, or your country from Directive 12 happens to sit next to a stray sea, check whether the requirement is already met before adding letters.

What breaks later

This directive is a quiet trap for your letter economy, and the Committee designed it that way:

• Directive 27 caps your total letters. Ski costs 3. Degree costs 6. In a tight endgame, that difference is the whole game.
• Directive 23 puts pressure on the letter e specifically. Ski and quay are the only rhymes that sidestep it entirely. Players who chose three in Act II have been observed renegotiating in Act III, at a checkpoint, from the beginning of the act.
• If Directive 16 is active in a month like September (backwards: rebmetpes, three e’s), your e budget is already strained. Do not spend more e’s here than you have to.

The Committee acknowledges that “ski” rhyming with “key” is not obvious to every applicant. The registry is final. Fern, who has never skied, endorses the choice on economic grounds alone.

Stuck on a different directive? Browse all 30 rule guides or return to the vault. Fern believes in you.