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The Dungeon

Kevin Wald

This text adventure game is a game of tic-tac-toe in disguise; "daytime" is X's turn, "nighttime" is O's turn, and selecting a "direction" is filling in a square. If X wins, you slay a creature; if O wins, the creature slays you; if it is a draw, you exit having neither slain nor been slain.

All descriptions fit into 40 columns precisely, with no need to break a word, with one exception: In the description of a slaying, the last word is always broken, with exactly three letters (and an exclamation mark) ending up on the next line. Thus, for each three-in-a-row, we get a corresponding set of three letters:

  Top row: lfa!
  Middle row: ist!
  Bottom row: ies!
  Left column: ifs!
  Middle column: iae!
  Right column: tls!
  \ diagonal: sif!
  / diagonal: ili!

There is only one arrangement of letters in the tic-tac-toe board so that each line of three contains the corresponding set of three letters (in any order):

FAL
SIT
IES

So the answer is FALSITIES.