How to play

JACK IN opens the game in your browser. On a phone, the browser's own menu offers to install it; installed, it runs fullscreen. Saves live in the browser; there is no account.

The menu

JACK IN starts a run: the layers of Gibson's defenses, each guarded by a board you clear to get through. FREE PLAY gives you any game on its own: it's a row of tiles, one per game, each with a picture of its board, the classic it's based on and your best score or streak. Move along the row with the arrow keys (or h and l) or a swipe, and open the middle tile with Enter or a tap; FREE PLAY remembers where you left it. STACK, DEFRAG and SCAN open on NEW BOARD, DAILY BOARD (the same layout for everyone that day) and VERSION, which is HACKER (the trace on) or CLASSIC (the plain game) and is remembered for that game. SCAN also has SIZE: LAN, WAN or BACKBONE, and DEFRAG has its DRAW and SCORING. INTERCEPT opens on its song list and DECRYPT on its three modes, both below. Under the tiles sit ENTER CODE, where a share code goes in, and HIGH SCORES. Every board has a share code in its pause menu (Escape, or the MENU button): send it to a friend and they get the exact layout you played.

STACK

STACK is Mahjongg solitaire. Match free tiles in pairs until the layout is gone. A tile is free when nothing sits on top of it and at least one of its long sides is open. The daemon faces are the flowers and seasons: any two daemons match each other, and a daemon never matches a suit face. Every layout is generated solvable from its seed.

With the trace on, the clock runs: three minutes until you are traced, then the counter-hacks begin (a lock on a pair, a forced shuffle, scrambled faces) while a second clock counts down, and at zero the connection is severed. A strong lock cannot be broken; it weakens after 45 seconds, or the moment it blocks your last legal match, and one tap breaks a weak one. Play the classic version and none of that happens: GNOME's rules, no fail state.

Tools sit in the corner stack (the wrench): a hint rings a free tile, a shuffle rearranges what is left, and each one charges the trace.

DEFRAG

DEFRAG is Klondike. Packets instead of cards: four subsystems (PWR and TX are hot, MEM and DSK are cold), ranks from BOOT at the bottom through DAEMON and SYSOP to ROOT at the top. Build down the table alternating hot and cold; build the four foundations up from BOOT; PULL from the feed one or three at a time (a setting); ROLLBACK undoes a move. PROBE shows the next move of a winning line from where you are, and refuses when there is none. Scoring is BOUNTY (Vegas) or AUDIT (standard), a setting.

SCAN

SCAN is Minesweeper. The grid is a network segment, the mines are ICE, and a number is a port scan: how many of the eight hosts around it are ICE. Your first scan (the uplink) is always clean and always opens an area, and no board ever needs a guess: every segment is checked before you see it, so the whole thing can be worked out from the numbers. Right-click (or long-press on a phone) plants a flag; click a number whose flags are all placed to sweep the hosts around it. SIZE picks the board: LAN is Windows' Beginner (9x9, 10 ICE), WAN is Intermediate (16x16, 40) and BACKBONE is Expert (30x16, 99).

In CLASSIC, touching ICE ends the board, just like the original. HACKER keeps you going: tripping ICE spikes the trace hard (half of the time you have before you're traced) and the board plays on. PROBE, the sonar button beside MENU (or O, or ctrl+P on the cursor's host), scans one host safely for a third of that price, so a blind guess is cheaper when the odds are good and the probe is cheaper when they're a coin flip. Once you're traced, the ICE fights back: it FIREWALLS a sector (those hosts refuse scans until the firewall weakens, after 45 seconds or when it's blocking the last move you can work out, and then one scan breaks it), MASKS six numbers (they show as noise until the next counter-hack; a sweep still uses the real number), or WIPES a sector you already scanned. The ICE only ever hides things. A number on the screen is always true.

In a run, SCAN nodes are the ones you hack to see where you're going: clearing one maps the layer around it and shows the daemons' patrols for a while. From the third layer some are required, because what they hide (the way down, or a node you need) can't be used until it's been scanned. A node's board asks you to EXTRACT marked hosts (clear every safe host around each mark), not to clear the whole segment.

INTERCEPT

INTERCEPT is a rhythm game. Packets fall down four lanes, and you catch each one as it reaches the line, on the beat of the song. On a keyboard the lanes are D, F, J and K, so your fingers stay on the home row; on a phone they're four wide pads along the bottom of the screen. Every chart is built from the song itself, so every packet is a note you can hear.

Pick a song from the list (the arrows, the UP and DOWN buttons, or a swipe); the highlighted one plays a preview. There are three difficulties on the same four lanes: SCRIPT KID never asks for two keys at once, RUNNER adds pairs, and ELITE adds quick repeats on one key and lets the melody cross onto your left hand.

Each hit is graded SYNC, CLEAN or LOSSY, and a miss is a DROP. Hits build a combo that multiplies your score up to four times and keep your SIGNAL up; drop too many and the signal runs out and the link is severed. The bar across the top shows how much of the song is left and how many packets you've captured.

Timing is judged on what you hear, and the game allows for the delay your browser reports. Bluetooth headphones and some phone speakers add more than they admit to: run CALIBRATE on the song screen, tap along to its click, and it sets your OFFSET. Run it again when you switch between headphones and speakers. Escape (or the pause button on a phone) pauses, with resume, retry and the song list.

DECRYPT

DECRYPT is a match-3. The board is an 8x8 grid of glyphs in six shapes. Swap two neighbors to line up three or more of a kind: they clear, the column falls, and new glyphs drop in from the top. If those line up too, that's a chain, and every link in a chain multiplies what it scores.

Bigger matches leave a special glyph behind. Four in a row makes a BURST, which clears the 3x3 around it when it goes off. An L or a T makes a SWEEP, which clears its whole row and column. Five in a row makes a WILDCARD: swap it with any glyph and every glyph of that kind clears.

There are three modes. TIMED gives you 90 seconds, and long chains and specials buy you a little more. The DAILY BOARD is the same 40 moves for everyone that day, with a streak for the days you finish it. ENDLESS has no clock and no limit. If the board runs out of moves it REKEYs: the same glyphs shuffle into a board you can play.

Swipe a glyph toward its neighbor, or tap one and then the other; with a mouse, click twice or drag. On a keyboard the arrows (or h, j, k and l) move a cursor, and Space then an arrow makes the swap. Every collision makes a sound on the next sixteenth note of the song that's playing, so a cascade plays as a run of notes in time with the beat.

Controls

Tap or click a tile or a packet to select it, tap its match to play. On a keyboard, every uncovered tile wears a one- or two-letter tag: type the tag to pick that tile (Tab hides and shows the tags; shift+Tab switches to a cursor you move with the arrow keys). Space opens the tool stack and each tool has its key; ? shows the keys line; Escape opens the pause menu, which holds the clock. The main menu is the arrow keys and Enter, or a tap. In SCAN the keyboard drives a cursor: the arrows or hjkl move it, Space or Enter scans (or sweeps a number), F flags, N jumps to the next unresolved host, and O arms the probe. On a phone, the FLAG button at the lower right switches taps between scanning and flagging, and a big board opens as a map you tap to zoom into.

Settings

Music, sound effects and volume; SCANLINES and VEIL, the two screen effects; BACKGROUND, the living field behind the board (LIVE picks a rule per deal, STILL is a calm gradient). The card table's own settings, PULL and SCORING, are in its pause menu under GAME SETTINGS.