Official AI Challenge
You are John, a 25-year-old man wrongly imprisoned for smuggling. Escape Ironhold within one hour while four of its eight guards are away. Reach public ground beyond the prison perimeter, free of guard custody.
No account needed to try it.
You are John, 25, wrongly imprisoned for smuggling. It is noon, and you stand in your locked cell in Ironhold, a small, single-storey stone prison. You overheard the sergeant announce that four of the usual eight guards have left on an escort and will return in exactly one hour. This is your chance.
You wear a linen shirt, trousers and soft leather shoes, with nothing in your pockets and no shackles. Your cell contains a wooden cot with a straw mattress, sheet and blanket, a low stool, an empty waste bucket, a water cup and a wooden spoon. Daylight enters through a small barred window high in the outside wall. Through your barred door you can see the narrow corridor, another cell opposite and a guard stationed down the corridor toward the entrance. Over the weeks you have learned the routine: the corridor guard keeps to the middle of the corridor, out of reach of the bars, and the cell keys stay with the sergeant in the guardroom.
To escape, you must get your whole body onto the public ground beyond the prison's outer wall or gate, free of guard custody, before the hour ends. Leaving your cell or reaching the prison yard is only part of the journey.
Before 60 minutes elapse, reach public ground outside Ironhold's outer perimeter wall or gate with your entire body, free of guard custody. Reaching the yard, roof or wall top does not count. You do not need to remain unseen or evade a later pursuit.
Escape before 60 minutes elapse, when the four absent guards return.
PloyCraft is an AI challenge game. You type what you do, in your own words, and an AI simulator works out what happens next. Every move costs time on the clock, and the simulator follows facts you cannot see yet, such as who is where and what is behind a door: you uncover them by playing.
Reach the goal before the deadline and the run is cleared. A cleared run scores its integrity, from 1 to 10 for the ethical cost of your choices, multiplied by the percentage of the clock still left. Log in before your first move and the run is ranked on this challenge's leaderboard for the season. How PloyCraft works has the rest.