Hacker: A Programming Puzzle

Hacker is a programming puzzle game created by Mark Engelberg, a designer who made Code Master which was also published with Thinkfun, a company who specializes in puzzle based games that can be enjoyed solo or with a group. 

Hacker comes with 40 challenges, each with 3 puzzles for you to solve. For every challenge, you need to solve the puzzle first as a coder, then the second puzzle a hacker; and finally third puzzle a security engineer. You start by setting up the game grid to resemble the platform setup from the challenge booklet.

How To Play Hacker

Start with the first puzzle, CODE IT. You have to navigate your agent(s) to pick up a document and exit using a series of instructions comprise of up, down, left, right, rotate clockwise and rotate counter-clockwise.

The programming puzzle challenge is to work with/around predefined instructions that are limiting your movement options. For example, you are moving toward the extraction point; you see the next action is a predefined rotation, and it will move you further away instead. You take advantage and use the rotation to advance? Or avoid the vortex? Given that you must complete the mission using the exact given number of steps, if you run out of steps you are doing it wrong. 

During HACK IT, you find your way to the virus. Same setup as CODE IT, you have to program a sequence of commands to get to the virus relative to your CODE IT instructions. Transform your CODE IT instructions into HACK IT instructions without physically taking any movement tiles off the control panel. Sliding left and right only. 

Quick tip. You can ignore or even remove the mini “document” tokens off the grid; HACK IT does not care if you pick up the document or not. The tokens are just visual noise.

Finally in the FIX IT challenge, with the knowledge gained from HACK IT, you apply a fix to the CODE IT instructions as hack prevention . Another word, knowing the potential hack path, you need to now apply a “fix” that will prevent the hack from happening. 

The idea behind the “fix” is to bound two stand-alone instructions together, so they can be executed back to back, leaving no gap to actualize the HACK IT instructions.

Programming Puzzle

Conceptually the game play is very similar to troubleshooting and debugging codes in real life, kind of like placing break points in debugger or running test cases. 

The beauty of this programming puzzle is, it forces you to think in sequential steps, which trains your brain to think ahead as you plan out your moves.

I particularly appreciate the game design behind the three phases in each challenge. In a developer’s perspective, after writing codes, we should always try to break it, then fix it, and repeat. It is important to teach best practices, especially to children who are aspire to work with codes. 

You don’t need to know how to program to play Hacker. This game trains you to think like one. Everything is done through tokens.

Family Hacker Experience

My husband said, this is one of those games that sounded really interesting when he was reading about it online but then when he had the game in front of him he found it confusing and not as fun as he’d hoped. He does sometimes like puzzle-y Thinkfun games like Traffic Jam, which works for him because you can fiddle with the components and think through the solution. Hacker does offer an element of that experience with very well designed tiles that flip and move with precision. But the setup and play of this experience wasn’t as fun as he’d hoped. Presumably this feeling has more to do with his personal taste in games rather than the effectiveness of this product for people who like programming puzzles of this sort.

Then he put this game in front of my 8-year-old and was impressed to watch him become engaged and completed puzzles one after another. It was like an illustration to his very mathematical minded brain, and we’ve come to appreciate how the logic puzzles have captured his attention. 

The beginner challenges are easy for him. On average he can solve all CODE IT puzzles under 3 minutes. He struggles with the HACK IT phase, however, mainly because the restriction against altering the sequence of CODE IT instructions is a bit much for his 8-year-old brain. Gradually, his excitement for the game drops as the puzzles become more difficult.

If you enjoy Hacker, check out our review on another ThinkFun’s game Robot Repair.

 

If you’d like to purchase a copy of Hacker and simultaneously support our site, please use this link 

Full disclosure, I have not play any of Thinkfun’s games prior to Hacker. This is the first.

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