🗼 Architect's Ascent

Pass the Claude Certified Architect exam by playing a game.

Climb the tower. Defeat the anti-pattern bosses. Out-architect The Proctor.

   

▶︎ pankajarm.github.io/cca-f-game — no install, no signup, progress saved in your browser.

---

A study game for the Claude Certified Architect — Foundations (CCA-F) exam, built from the ground up and current as of June 2026. Instead of grinding a PDF of flashcards, you climb a ten-floor tower, fight a boss made of each way real agent systems break, and finish against The Proctor — a faithful 60-question, 120-minute exam simulator. Every one of the 192 questions was written to the real exam blueprint and then put through an adversarial fact-check.

It's one folder of static files. Nothing to build, nothing to install.

Pick your mode — campaign, exam sim, lightning, hunt	The Tower — ten floors, ten bosses, five domains

⚔️ Fight the anti-patterns, don't memorize them

Each floor boss is a production failure mode — and it talks back. The Loop Terminator stopped reading your agent's output three turns ago. The Tool Hoarder gave one agent eighteen tools and wonders why it picks wrong. You beat them by choosing the answer that fixes the root cause, not the one that bolts a patch onto a broken design.

10 questions, 3 hearts, combo streaks that land critical hits and drop power-ups: 🗜️ /compact trims two wrong options · 💭 Extended Thinking reveals a hint · 🛡️ Checkpoint forgives a miss.

📋 Then survive The Proctor

The exam simulator is the real thing minus the webcam: 60 questions drawn to the exact domain weights, a 120-minute countdown, flag-for-review, a live question navigator, and a scaled score out of 1000 with the 720 pass line — followed by a per-domain breakdown so you know exactly which floor to re-climb.

Real exam conditions — timer, flags, navigator	Scaled score + domain breakdown

🎮 Six ways to study

Mode	What it is
🗼 The Tower	The campaign. Ten floors, ten bosses with banter and grudges. Clear at 7/10 to ascend; ★ for a perfect 10.
📋 The Proctor	Faithful exam sim — 60 weighted questions, 120-min clock, /1000 scoring, full answer review.
⚡ Lightning Round	90 seconds, unlimited questions, combos multiply your score. For people who read the question before the options load.
🔦 Anti-Pattern Hunt	Twelve production war stories, each hiding one monster. Name it to capture it.
🩹 Mistake Clinic	Every question you miss checks in here. Get it right twice in a row to discharge it — spaced repetition aimed at your weak spots.
🏆 Trophy Hall	14 achievements, 7 titles from Apprentice to Certified Architect, daily streaks.

The Bestiary — collect all 12 anti-pattern monsters	Proper dark mode for late-night cramming

🧠 The question bank is the point

questions.js holds 192 scenario questions — 150 across the ten floors, 30 cross-domain exam-pool questions, and 12 hunt vignettes. They were authored against a June-2026 brief of the real exam — stop_reason loop mechanics, hooks vs prompts, MCP config scopes, the CLAUDE.md hierarchy, skills frontmatter, claude -p CI patterns, batch API economics, schema design, context management, escalation policy — then every question was audited by an adversarial reviewer agent that argued for each distractor like a grumpy test-taker filing an appeal. Anything defensible got rewritten.

The principle baked into every answer: the correct option fixes the root cause; the distractors are patches on a flawed design. (Better tool descriptions before a routing classifier. A deterministic hook before a sterner prompt. A nullable schema field before a "don't fabricate" warning.)

📐 The exam this trains you for

Fact	Value
Exam	Claude Certified Architect — Foundations (CCA-F)
Launched	March 12, 2026
Format	60 multiple-choice scenario questions
Time	120 minutes
Scoring	Scaled out of 1000, pass at 720
Level	301 — expects 6+ months of production Claude experience
Cost	$99 (free for early partner-org employees)
Scenario pools	6 total, 4 randomly selected per sitting

Domain blueprint — the simulator draws with exactly these weights, and the tower is laid out to match:

Domain	Weight	Tower floors
D1 · Agentic Architecture & Orchestration	27%	F1 Loop Chamber · F2 Coordination Hall · F3 Hook Forge
D2 · Tool Design & MCP Integration	18%	F4 Tool Armory
D3 · Claude Code Configuration & Workflows	20%	F5 Config Maze · F6 Pipeline Forge
D4 · Prompt Engineering & Structured Output	20%	F7 Prompt Workshop · F8 Validation Gauntlet
D5 · Context Management & Reliability	15%	F9 Memory Halls · F10 Synthesis Chamber

▶︎ Play it

Online — nothing to install: pankajarm.github.io/cca-f-game

Locally:

python3 scripts/serve.py        # → http://localhost:4173

…or just open index.html in any browser. Progress (XP, floors, bestiary, exam history, mistake deck) saves automatically to your browser's localStorage.

🖨️ Prefer paper?

questions.js is the single source of truth; the printable study materials are generated from it with python3 scripts/build_tests.py:

• practice-tests/test-01…10-*.md — 15 questions per floor, answers in collapsible spoilers
• practice-tests/full-exam-01.md — a fixed 60-question paper exam with answer key
• practice-tests/anti-pattern-hunt.md — the twelve war stories, printable
• GAME.md — quest log, XP rules, and how to run boss battles with Claude Code as your dungeon master
• STUDY_GUIDE.md — a 12-week, 1-hour-a-day syllabus mapped to the tower

✨ Design

Built for long study sessions, not eye strain. Inter for prose, Bricolage Grotesque for display, and monospace (JetBrains Mono) reserved for actual code tokens like stop_reason and .mcp.json — which the game detects and typesets automatically. Warm ivory-and-terracotta by day, a proper dark mode by night, answers by keyboard 1–4, audio you can mute.

---

_{Not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. Question content is original, written to the public shape of the exam — not dumps. If you can clear the tower and beat The Proctor at 720+, you're studying the right things. Go book the real one. 🎓}