LAN: Letters against Numbers guides
These guides explain how LAN: Letters against Numbers works in detail: what the game tells you in passing and what you learn the hard way, run after run. They are written from the game's own rules, with its real numbers, and updated when something changes.
If you are just starting, read the first one. Guides that cover letters or numbers you may not have met yet keep that part inside a fold marked spoiler, so you choose whether to know before you find out.
Getting started
The basics for your first weeks: how a run goes, what to do with each currency and how to place your squad so it holds.
- Getting started in LAN: a guide to your first runs
What to do in your first games of LAN: how a run goes, what to spend diphthongs on, how the syllable ticket works and what to buy with your first triptongs.
- Syllables, diphthongs and triptongs: LAN's currencies explained
How LAN's three currencies are earned and spent, with the real costs: copies per level, run upgrades, squad slots, formations, speed and the looks shop.
- Squad and formations in LAN: how to place your letters
How to build a good squad in LAN: letter roles, numeric and literary damage, how the game works out damage, which formation to pick, and example squads.
Climbing higher
Once you have the basics down, what slows you is what lies above: number powers, the letters you don't own yet and the bosses. Spoilers stay folded.
- Number powers in LAN: why a 7³ outlasts a 7²
What the little exponents on LAN's numbers mean, how much stronger each power makes them, the height at which each one steps up, and how to get ready for it.
- LAN's letters and their skills: a guide to the whole alphabet
All 27 letters in LAN, from A to Ñ: each one's role, damage type, what its skill does, the height it shows up from and where to place it. With spoiler warnings.
- LAN's bosses and how to beat them: from the 42 to the Shapeshifter
When each LAN boss shows up, what it does and how to beat it: the 42, the Beast, the 1000, Infinity, Fibonacci and the Shapeshifter. With spoiler warnings.
Beyond the game
The genre LAN belongs to and the real history of the numbers that fill it: mathematics, computing and pop culture.
- What are idle games, and why are they so hard to put down?
What an idle or incremental game is, where the genre comes from, the mechanics they share, why they're so hard to quit, and how to tell one that respects your time.
- From 42 to NaN: the real stories behind LAN's numbers
Why 42 is “the answer”, what NaN is, where 1337 comes from and why 404 means “not found”: the math, computing and culture behind the numbers in LAN.