Mission Prep
Operation Uplift is a 45-minute co-op mission: your team digitally transforms a struggling (and entirely fictional) nonprofit before its grant deadline. This page tells you what each part of the operation actually is — enough to walk in confident, not enough to spoil the fun.
Your crew
4–20 agents, each on their own browser. Laptop beats phone — rounds 1 and 4 love screen space.
The clock
45 minutes for the full five-round mission, or a 25-minute express cut (rounds 1, 2, and the vault).
Zero prep
Nothing to install, nothing to memorize. A live host runs the session and Champ guides you in-game.
The operation, part by part
The one rule that spans everything: the game deliberately gives different agents different information. Talking is not cheating — talking is the game.
Round 1 · Warm-up · everyone together
Sort the shoebox
The nonprofit's records live in a literal shoebox — crumpled receipts, thank-you notes, sign-up sheets. Each record needs filing into the right category. Everyone sees the same pile, and the first correct answer locks that record for the whole team.
Play it as a team: Divide the pile out loud — call which records you're taking so two agents aren't racing the same scrap. If one stumps you, read it to the room; the right bin usually announces itself.
Round 2 · Cipher relay · information is split
The donor migration
A donor message has been scrambled with a Caesar cipher — every letter shifted down the alphabet by the same secret amount. Each agent receives a different numbered fragment of the scrambled text on their own screen, and the app will never show your fragment to anyone else. Decoded, the message turns out to be a question the team answers together.
Play it as a team: Read your fragments aloud in number order and appoint a scribe. Crack the shift once — if A became D, everything moved by three — and that one number unlocks every fragment. Got more agents than fragments? The spares are coordinators: they run the reassembly.
Round 3 · Logic deduction · shared feedback
The matching engine
The sponsor portal wants a code nobody wrote down. Submit a guess at the hidden combination and the whole team instantly sees the feedback: how many symbols are exactly right, and how many are right but in the wrong slot.
Play it as a team: Agree on each guess before anyone hits submit — every attempt is information, so spend it deliberately. Change one thing at a time and watch the counts move. Guess to learn, not to gamble.
Round 4 · Live coordination · information is split
Volunteer scramble
One shared schedule grid, updating live for everyone. Each agent holds a few volunteers that only they can place. Every volunteer is free for some slots and not others, every shift has limited seats, and nobody can be double-booked.
Play it as a team: Announce before you place, and start with your least flexible volunteers — the ones with only a slot or two free. Placed someone badly? You can pull a volunteer back off the grid and move them. Collisions are fixable; silence isn't.
Round 5 · The vault · everything comes together
Submit the grant
No new puzzle — every round you cleared earned the team a clue stamp. Chain the stamps together in round order and you have the grant portal's access code.
Play it as a team: Read the stamps back to each other and confirm the full code out loud before submitting. If the team is stuck, the host can step in with an assist — it costs a few points, but the mission is always winnable and the score never drops below zero.
One team, any number of rooms
Split across locations
The game doesn’t care where anyone sits — every agent plays from their own browser, and fragments, volunteers, and clue stamps land wherever the players are. In the lobby you can tell the game your location (office, city, “my kitchen”), and the mission uses it to spread the secret pieces fairly across sites. What the whole team doesneed is one shared voice channel: put everyone on a single call (Teams, Zoom, Meet — whatever you use) or conference the rooms together. Because the mission splits information between players on purpose, a location that can’t be heard is a location whose clues are lost.
Pairing up
When the host turns pairing on, two agents can partner up in the lobby — send an invite, they accept, done. A confirmed pair works as one seat: you both receive the same secret pieces on your own screens and tackle them together. Great for mixing veterans with first-timers, or for anyone who’d rather co-pilot than drive. Pairs lock when the mission starts, so partner up before the clock does.
Hybrid rooms
Mixing an in-office group with remote teammates? The office will naturally talk off-mic — make it a habit to repeat anything important into the call. Nominating one on-site agent as the “radio operator” who relays for the room works wonders.
Field notes
Wrong answers cost nothing but time
Champ calls a miss interference, never failure. Say your idea out loud and try it — a spoken wrong answer moves the team further than a silent right one.
You can buy clues from HQ
Any agent can call a clue vote, paid in team points — it passes when more than half the team's seats vote yes (a pair shares one seat, and not voting counts as no). Spend them wisely — a well-timed clue beats staying stuck, but every one shaves the score. Your host can also release hints directly.
The one-time answer reveal
Truly cornered? The team can vote to reveal the current round's full answer — once per mission, it costs the round's whole score, and it takes a two-thirds supermajority to pass. Talk it over before you call it; there's no second one.
You win together
Scoring is co-op: a shared Team Progress Meter plus individual scores for flavor. Every agent ends the mission with a superlative badge and a percentile against every team that came before. No losers — humor, never shame.
The host runs the room
A live host proctors every session — starting rounds, pausing the clock if real life interrupts, sending hints. You never need to manage the game, only play it.
All organizations in this mission are fictional.