What is Bandito
Bandito is a western town you ride through on horseback and a chain of logic boards you solve on foot. Dusty Gulch has five doors that matter: the saloon, the sheriff’s office, the stable, the general store and, up on the rise behind them, the bank. Behind each of the first four waits somebody who will ride with you, and each of them sets the same kind of test — a ring of lamps tied together by lines of alliance. Click one lamp and it flips, and so does every lamp joined to it. Get all of them burning and the ally is yours; the door gets a green tick and one more slot fills in the row at the top left.
The difficulty is in the lines, not the lamps. The saloon board has nine lamps and twelve lines; the vault has sixteen lamps and twenty-two, with one lamp in the middle wired to more of the ring than any other. A lamp tied to five neighbours cannot be touched without disturbing all five, so the board pushes back at every click. Every board is built by scrambling a finished one, which is why a way home always exists, and the number labelled Par is not a guess: the game solves the board with linear algebra over two values and walks the whole set of equivalent answers to find the genuinely shortest one. That is the number you are trying to match. A hint costs fifty points and lights the next lamp of a shortest route.
How to play
- Ride with the arrow keys or WASD; on a phone use the round joystick at the bottom left. Press M, or the MOUNT button, to get down — you cannot walk through a door on horseback, and the sign above the door says so if you try.
- Stand at the doorway on foot and press E or Enter, or tap ENTER on a phone. The saloon, the sheriff’s office, the stable and the general store each hold one ally and one board. The sheriff himself walks the street between them and has a line for you, but he never gets in the way.
- Inside, click or tap a lamp to flip it and every lamp joined to it by a line. Lit lamps are gold, dark ones are brown, and the lines between two lit lamps glow. When every lamp on the board is burning, the ally joins you. Escape, or the EXIT button in the corner, leaves a board and keeps the allies you already have.
- With four ticks the sign under the bank changes from locked to open. The vault is the last and largest board; solve it and the run ends with your score. Ride On starts a fresh level with new boards for all five doors and the allies cleared.
Strategies that work
- Clicking a lamp twice puts the board back exactly as it was, so the board is its own undo button. Experiment as much as you like — only the clock and the click counter cost you anything, and both are cheap next to a wrong hint.
- The arithmetic of the score: five hundred points for an ally, three hundred more if you finished at Par or under, one hundred and fifty if you were within two clicks of it, and a thousand on top for the vault. A hint costs fifty. So a hint pays for itself only if it saves you three stray clicks or more.
- On the stable, the store and the vault there is a lamp in the middle of the ring, wired to more lines than anything else. Decide about that one first: whether it belongs in your answer changes what almost every other lamp needs.
- Start from the dark lamps with the fewest lines. A lamp with only two connections can be reached in very few ways, so it pins down a piece of the answer while the crowded middle is still open.
- Par is the true minimum, not an estimate. If you are five clicks over it you are not close to a shorter route — you are on a different one. Leave with Escape and walk back in: the same board comes back unscrambled, and you can start the line of reasoning again from a clean slate.
A little history
The lamps-and-lines board belongs to a family of puzzles that a small electronic toy made popular in the mid-nineties: a grid of buttons where pressing one flips it and its neighbours, and the goal is to clear the lot. What looks like trial and error is a piece of linear algebra in disguise. Each lamp is an equation, each button a variable, and everything is counted modulo two, because pressing a button twice is the same as never pressing it at all. Written that way the board becomes a system of equations that Gaussian elimination settles in a moment — it says whether a solution exists, and it produces one. Bandito uses exactly that, both to guarantee that no board it hands you is impossible and to work out Par, walking the space of equivalent answers to report the shortest rather than the first one found. The western around it is invented from the ground up: Dusty Gulch, its five doors, the sheriff on his beat and the horse that will not walk indoors.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to finish in one sitting?
No. The allies you have recruited and the level you are on are kept in your browser, so you can close the page and walk back into town later. The score in the corner starts again from zero on a reload, but your record does not.
Is the sheriff dangerous?
No, and that is deliberate. He patrols the street between the saloon and the store and says his piece if you press E beside him, but he never catches you and there is nothing to run from. The only thing standing between you and the vault is the boards.
What makes the daily challenge different?
The five boards are built from the date in UTC, so everybody in the world gets the same five and the day changes at the same instant everywhere. In daily mode the game also puts everyone back to level one with no allies, because the level number feeds the boards and a veteran would otherwise be playing a different day to everyone else.
