Joker's Vault
Carnival locks, opened by feel: find the one angle that turns the plug, hold it there, set the pin. This page is the help desk for players.
Write to us: candy@beatapiotrowska.quest
Opening a lock
- Aim. Somewhere in the keyway is one angle that turns the plug, and nothing marks it. Drag anywhere on the lock to swing the pick and go looking.
- Pull the wrench. Hold tension and the lock answers: the further you are from the spot, the harder the pick shudders — and the faster it wears. That shudder is the only compass there is.
- Hold it. Inside the spot the plug starts to turn, faster the nearer you are to its centre. Keep it there until the pin sets. Ease off and the plug falls straight back.
Every pin is another round of the same three moves. Set them all and the vault is open.
Nothing here is luck
No dice, no hidden roll, no chance of a lock being unwinnable. The spot is in a fixed place, the shudder tells you truthfully how far away you are, and a lock that beat you will behave exactly the same way next time. If a vault feels impossible, it is a lock you have not read yet — not a bad draw.
Picks, coins and the daily hand-out
A pick is spent only when it snaps. Open a vault cleanly and you keep every one of them and earn more, which is why a careful hand plays all evening on a handful of picks and a heavy one runs dry in ten minutes.
The hand-out is keyed to the day on your own calendar, so "come back tomorrow" means tomorrow, not twenty-four hours from now. Coins come out of play and nothing else; there is no way to buy them and no screen that asks for a card.
Picks themselves are tools rather than colours. Tougher steel turns the plug slower, a pick that survives anything tells you least about where the spot is, and a brittle one cools fast but snaps early. Upgrades bought with XP widen the sweet spot, soften the wear or grow the hand-out, and each line ends in a capstone.
The locks themselves
Vaults come in tiers, and opening enough of one tier opens the next. Each lock also carries its own habits, which are printed on it before you start: one binds twice and moves again right at the end, one gives no pulse at all and has to be read from the shudder alone, one will not hold its spot under load, one slides back the moment you ease off, and one eats picks by doubling the cost of every wrong second.
Read the habit first, then pick the tool for it. That is the whole strategy, and it is why the same vault plays differently in two different hands.
When something goes wrong
I am out of picks
Buy a few with coins in the shop, or come back tomorrow for the hand-out. Nothing expires while you wait and no timer is running.
The pick snaps almost immediately
You are holding tension far from the spot. Wear comes from distance, not from time: sweep first with light contact, and only bear down once the shudder softens.
The pin sets and then unsets
That is a lock that binds twice — the second bind comes right at the end. Hold through it rather than easing off when the turn first gives.
I want to start over
Reset progress in settings clears every best result, every upgrade and every coin at once. It asks first, and it cannot be undone. Cache Reset beside it is a different thing entirely and leaves your progress alone.
Sound, vibration, language
Three separate switches in settings. The game speaks English, German, Portuguese, Finnish and Slovak, and the language changes without a restart.
Where my progress lives
On this phone. There is no account and nothing syncs, so a new phone starts at the first vault and we cannot restore a record from our side. Deleting the app takes everything with it.
The prompt about tracking
That is the system's own, shown once. Declining it changes nothing about the game — no lock, no pick and no hand-out depends on the answer. What is collected, and for how long it is kept, is in the privacy policy.
Write to us
Read by the people who made the game, normally answered within two working days.
- your iPhone model and its iOS version;
- the vault and the pick you were using;
- what you did and what the lock did instead;
- a screen recording, if it is something that moves.
A lock that behaves differently from this page is worth reporting exactly: it means the game is doing something it does not intend to.
Player support for Joker's Vault · revised 14 September 2026 · iPhone, iOS 16.0 or later