Play a Duet

Design and direction · July 2026–present

You're in a lighthouse looking at six brass cams. Each one makes the lamp blink in a different rhythm, and none of them are labeled. There's another lighthouse out on the water already blinking, and you have to answer it in the same rhythm. You can't see it. It's on the other person's screen.

So they describe it. Two quick ones, then a gap? You mount the cam you think that is, pull the lever, and find out.

The Keeper's room in The Lighthouse Ledger, drawn in flat vector shapes: hanging lamps, charts pinned to the wall, barrels and an hourglass, a rain-streaked window onto a night sea with the moon low over the water, and a small figure carrying a lit lantern. — The Keeper's side. The storm has taken the lights, so you read by a hand lantern that only shows a small circle at a time.

That's the first puzzle in Lock & Letter, the game at playaduet.com. Three escape rooms for two people, 30 to 60 minutes each, free in a browser. You both open the same page, get on a call, and end up in different rooms. I made it because my girlfriend and I kept looking for a game we could play together over a call and kept not finding one.

One rule

The thing you operate and the instructions for it are never on the same screen. Neither of you can solve anything alone, and neither of you ends up watching the other person play.

A game panel headed Lamp Room Find, Radio Paper Tape. A strip of punched tape sits mostly in darkness with one bright circle of lantern light falling across it, and the paragraph below is dim and half-legible. — One puzzle, two screens. One of you has the tape that got punched; the other has the key that has to answer it. Neither page has both halves.

A game panel headed Keeper's Bench, Wireless Key, showing a telegraph key and a blank paper tape. The only instruction reads: the key clicks freely, short press, short mark. There is no answer box. — One puzzle, two screens. One of you has the tape that got punched; the other has the key that has to answer it. Neither page has both halves.

The same style of panel, headed Keeper's Bench, Storm Shutter, with a badge reading The roles reverse, this is Navigator's work. Below it a pendulum hangs between two chimes. — Each puzzle has a completely different mechanic.

The three rooms

They unlock in order. The equipment list is one line: a voice you trust on the other end of a call.

The Lighthouse Ledger (35–50 min). One of you keeps the lamp; the other reads the instruments across the water.
The Postcard Society (30–45 min). A mail club that receives postcards from places that shouldn't exist. One works the archive desk, the other sorts the route.
The Conservatory Clock (45–60 min). A greenhouse clock rewinding an inherited garden. The longest of the three.

The Lock & Letter catalog page: an expedition list of three chapters on the left, and a panel for The Lighthouse Ledger on the right with a lighthouse illustration, a difficulty selector, and a Start room button. — The difficulties are named after weather.

How it works

No puzzle has an answer box. A stage opens when the mechanism is in the right state: cams mounted in order, four punched cards lined up over a lightbox, a key filed down until it clears all five pins. An answer box would turn every puzzle into a password check, and then you stop describing the thing in front of you and start reading letters at each other.

There's no server either — no accounts, no room codes, nothing that breaks when somebody stops paying a host. Almost all the coordination happened when I wrote the rooms. If the reading you need is only printed on the other page, there's nothing to sync.

I designed the rooms, wrote the letters, and specified what each mechanism had to do. Coding agents I directed wrote the 21,000 lines of JavaScript and 4,600 of CSS underneath, in a day.

Play it at playaduet.com → · Source →