14 years in, modders have given me yet another reason to return to Fallout: New Vegas—an in-game multiplayer riddle contest with free games for the winner

(Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment)

Steam informs me that Fallout: New Vegas is my second-most-played game of all time (after Crusader Kings 2), and I will still take any excuse to boot it up again. Lucky for me, then, that some enterprising modders have launched an ongoing online contest taking place entirely within the borders of NV's Mojave Desert.

Called Ready Courier One and created by a modder named TommInfinite, the mod is "an online contest for Fallout: New Vegas where anyone can win the prize." The contest centres around 26 riddles about various bits of Fallout lore. You install it, get presented with a riddle, and set out to press N on the answer—which can be anything from an NPC to a minor static object—somewhere in New Vegas or its DLCs, except Honest Hearts for some reason. It knows what it did.

But it's all online, you see. Your answers get sent off to some distant server which decides if they're correct or not, and you're in competition with every other player trudging across the desert. The first player to answer the 26th and final riddle will net themselves any three games from the Nexus Mods Donation Points store, which features stuff like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Resident Evil 2 Remake, Crusader Kings 3, and, uh, Fallout: New Vegas.

It's an idea I like a lot, and a good way to breathe life into an old and dusty classic. To give as many people as possible a chance to participate, the full suite of riddles is releasing in three batches. The first set is out now, the second will come out on January 21, and the final set will be released on January 27. Whoever answers the final riddle will get a code phrase to post in the mod's comment section on Nexus Mods, making them the winner.

The contest requires a few things to get working, but nothing more complicated than your average Skyrim mod. You'll need NVSE, the JIP LN NVSE Plugin, and the SUP NVSE add-on, then you'll just need to drop the contents of Ready Courier One's .rar file into your New Vegas Data Files folder.

You'll also need to get an API key from Nexus Mods to plug into the pop-up box that greets you when you launch the game for the first time. And then? To the victor go the spoils.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.