The single most useful piece of advice in this game has nothing to do with any specific puzzle: agree one signal system up front, then reuse that whole system across every puzzle of the same kind. The author of the 100% achievement guide puts it plainly - once fixed gesture sequences are assigned to fixed symbols, "these gestures then reused across a whole family of puzzles with no new system needed". What you save is not a few minutes on one puzzle, it is reinventing a way to communicate at every one after it.
The problem is that nobody tells you which system your puzzle needs. So this page gives four protocols that have been proven in the field, and then an encoder: tell it how many distinct answers you have to distinguish, and it generates the scheme.
Four protocols
Choose by what the other person can give you, not by the puzzle's name. That is the whole trick to picking right: if they can move freely, use the first; if they are down to a single button, you must use the second.
01
Numbered gestures
Use it when - You can move freely but the other person cannot make out detail. Fits anything shaped like "pick one of N symbols".
How it works - Give the N options a fixed order, then transmit which one by combining body part with a repeat count.
1Align the direction first: agree out loud on "from the left" or "from the top" before you start counting. Most failures are an unaligned direction, not a gesture nobody knows.
2Split the list into groups, one body part each: left hand = group 1, right hand = group 2, both hands = group 3.
3Within a group, the repeat count is the position: three raises with the left hand = third item of group 1.
4Have the other person repeat it back before acting - a readback is free error correction.
Evidence - 100% achievement guide: "we found it helped a lot to assign a specific gesture, or sequence of gestures, to a specific symbol, because the same gestures then reused across a whole family of puzzles with no new system needed." The purple-challenge field report uses exactly this for the nine speakers: raises with the left hand = position in the top row, right hand = middle row, both hands = the single one on its own.
Use it when - There are too many options to number, or **the other person can only produce a binary signal** - one button, or one flashing light.
How it works - Turn guessing into a binary search: ask one yes/no question at a time and halve the candidates each time.
1Agree the binary signal: one = yes, two = no.
2Then agree an emergency signal: several in a row means stop / restart / danger. Without it, one misunderstanding costs the whole round.
3Ask broad to narrow: which wall first, then which group, then which item inside the group.
4N candidates only need ceil(log2 N) yes/no rounds - the encoder below works out how many for your case.
5After each level is confirmed, write the remaining range down (or hold it in your head) so nobody forgets what has already been asked.
Evidence - The purple-challenge field report does exactly this: "the person who can see it only has a red light button. So we asked yes/no questions - one flash for yes, two for no, and many flashes in a row if they needed us to stop and restart. Questions went wide to narrow: which wall, then which group, then which specific one."
Use it when - Puzzles where you submit a whole set of answers at once and a failure restarts everything - the 36-picture puzzle, for example.
How it works - Sort your answers into "I am sure" and "I am guessing", so a failure only needs a few re-checked.
1Before submitting, each person marks which of theirs are certain and which are uncertain.
2If it fails, re-check only the uncertain ones first. Do not start the whole thing again.
3Say the uncertain numbers out loud, so the team aims its attention at exactly those.
Evidence - From the purple-challenge field report, verbatim: "note down which answers you are 100% sure of and which you only mostly are. That makes it far easier to re-check a few uncertain ones when the first attempt does not go through."
Use it when - The thing you have to transmit is a whole picture or a whole description, and acting it out directly will fail.
How it works - Any piece of information splits into **kind + position + count**. Send one at a time, and confirm before the next.
1Say the kind first (round / triangular / striped).
2Then the position (which one, counted in the agreed direction).
3Then the count (repeat it that many times).
4Wait for confirmation on each part before sending the next.
Evidence - Put together by this site from what the separated-communication puzzles have in common (silent room, orange storage, interrogation room). The purple-challenge field report describes the same approach for describing 36 pictures - it keeps asking for detail, for example "is the petal a polygon or only an outline" and "how many petals on the flower part".
Signal encoder
Enter two numbers and it tells you what to gesture - at the granularity of "three raises with the left hand", something you can act on directly. These tables are not copied from anywhere; they are computed from the constraints you enter, which is why they work on puzzles we have never written up.
Count how many possible answers there are: nine speakers is 9, thirty-six pictures is 36.
Use numbered gestures
This setup expresses 12 distinct values, and you need 9
How to use it: agree out loud where counting starts - from the left or from the top - then read the table below. The group decides which body part, and the repeat count decides which item within that group.
Item 1
Left hand · 1 repeats
Item 2
Left hand · 2 repeats
Item 3
Left hand · 3 repeats
Item 4
Left hand · 4 repeats
Item 5
Right hand · 1 repeats
Item 6
Right hand · 2 repeats
Item 7
Right hand · 3 repeats
Item 8
Right hand · 4 repeats
Item 9
Both hands · 1 repeats
The encoding itself is arbitrary - what matters is that both sides use the same table. So spend the 30 seconds running your own numbers through it before you start; it is far cheaper than not spending them.
Why 30 seconds on a protocol is worth it
Because almost every failure is a counting-direction failure
Most cases of "I signalled it and they did the wrong thing" are not a bad gesture, they are two people counting from opposite ends. The first clause of any protocol is always "say which side you start from", and that one sentence removes the largest class of failures.
Because these puzzles are a family, not one puzzle
It is not one puzzle that takes your voice away: silent room, orange barn, interrogation room, and in the purple challenges the nine speakers and the 36 pictures. Reusing the same gestures means every later one starts with communication already solved.
Because one misunderstanding costs the whole round
Puzzles like these take one submission of the entire answer, and a failure restarts everything. So a protocol must include an emergency "stop and restart" signal - without it you will keep building on an answer that is already wrong.
What is ours on this page and what is a player's
The four protocols and their steps - distilled from field reports and reference guides, each with its source named so you can open it and check.
The dimension-split protocol - is ours, generalised from what the separated-communication puzzles have in common (silent room, orange barn, interrogation room). It is not any single guide's wording, so it is not presented as a quotation.
The tables the encoder generates - pure arithmetic, independent of game data. They just turn "agree a system first" into a table you can execute.
What we could not do - one player-made gesture alphabet, ordered by letter frequency, exists only as a single image, so we cannot transcribe its individual movements. We borrowed the design idea and nothing more.
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