The Twelve Trials was a puzzle and promotional website celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Assassin's Creed series. Over 3 months, from 14 June–11 September 2022, players were invited to answer 10 weekly trivia questions about the games to earn entries in a grand prize draw for an all-expenses-paid, one-week trip to Italy for two any time between April–June 2023.[1]
The 15th anniversary roadmap lasted the contest's duration
The contest was open to everyone worldwide who was 18 years of age or older, excluding residents in the Canadian province of Quebec. Upon visiting the game site, players were prompted to sign in to their Ubisoft Connect account to keep track of which questions they answered correctly and to see how they fared in the leaderboards. From there, they had one week to answer trivia on that week's profiled main game, working in reverse chronological order of the series' releases, starting with 2020's Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and ending with 2007's Assassin's Creed.[1]
Answering all the questions correctly earned one entry in a draw for that week's prize of an Assassin's Creed statue, with the exception of Weeks 6, 7, and 10, which rewarded an Assassin's Creed game,[1] a themed[2] gaming chair[3] and desk[4] by Secretlab, and another game, respectively. Ten correct answers also gave one entry for the grand prize draw. For players who did not have a Ubisoft account, they could also submit their answers by email to "AC15quiz@ubisoft.com", so long as it was within the week that the questions were live. However, this entry method was limited to adults in the United States and Canada only, and came with the condition that these players could not then create a Ubisoft account and submit future answers from there, nor could players who already had an account also submit their answers by email in attempt to earn more entries.[1]
Journey with the Fryes in Syndicate and test yourself with ten adventures from their time in London. Knowledge is power. How well do you know this title?
Prize
30cm Jacob Frye figurine from the Big Ben Collector's Case edition of Syndicate.[8]
The Rooks, a London gang that fights against the Blighters. At one point, the color of their clothing changes from green to black, as they are led by...
Fight your way through Assassin's Creed 3 and Liberation to discover ten tales from the Revolutionary War. Knowledge is power. How well do you know this title?
In the eighth Assassin's Creed: Valhalla question, it asks for the translation of the Old Norse term sýn, which is the root for the name of Eivor's raven "Sýnin". Although the official answers say that the correct response is "vision", Sýnin's name was described both in-universe in the memory "The Hunting Grounds" and by Creative Director Ashraf Ismail during Valhalla's promotional marketing as meaning "insight",[21] which is another possible trivia answer.
In the tenth Assassin's Creed: Origins question, the title cards for Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Assassin's Creed: Rogue displayed the wrong characters, with the Colonial Templar Shay Cormac labeled as being in Black Flag and the pirate Edward Kenway seeming to appear in Rogue. However, Shay was born in 1731 once the Golden Age of Piracy had ended, while Edward was long dead by the time of the Seven Years' War depicted in Rogue and was only mentioned in passing. This error lasted the duration of the week players could answer the Origins trivia questions and was not fixed by the time the quiz closed in preparation for the Syndicate set.
In the third Assassin's Creed: Unity question, each of the suggested dates for the Women's March on Versailles are also the dates for events either seen elsewhere in Assassin's Creed or referenced in supplementary media. 5 September 1781 was the date for the Battle of the Chesapeake as seen in Assassin's Creed III; 5 October 1789 was the Women's March in Unity; and 5 November 1605 was Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up the Palace of Westminster in the Gunpowder Plot, which was mentioned in James Morse's emails on Abstergo.com after junior professor Shaun Hastings used Fawkes' name as an alias to leak information on Abstergo Industries.
In the tenth Assassin's Creed: Rogue question, it mentions the player collecting the scattered pages of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. Although it would still have a few years left in its circulation each time Franklin met Shay in the mid-1750s, the question and accompanying picture are anachronistic to the series' internal history, as that activity is instead started by Haytham Kenway in the Seven Years' War and completed by his son Ratonhnhaké:ton in the American Revolution.
The image in the seventh Black Flag question is a horizontally flipped promotional screenshot, as Edward's robes always have his pistol bandoleer cross from his right shoulder to his left hip, rather than from his left shoulder to his right hip as presented.
In the fourth Assassin's Creed III question, each of the suggested names for Ratonhnhaké:ton's mission with Paul Revere are memories from different stages of the American Revolutionary War. "Unconvinced" is set in the prelude of the Seven Years' War, "The Midnight Ride" happens at the war's start, and "Alternate Methods" occurs when the war has been underway for a year. Additionally the accompanying image has Ratonhnhaké:ton inexplicably wearing Altaïr's robes. With the exception of Al Mualim's black robes with grey detail and red trim, all members of the Levantine Brotherhood wore plain white fabric made in a standardized fashion, noticeably lacking both the larger beak and its embossed eagle on the more open hood of Ratonhnhaké:ton's robes, the comparatively bulkier arms and cuffs of an 18th-century full dress uniform, and the beaded arm band denoting Ratonhnhaké:ton's ties to the Kanien'kehá:ka. This error lasted the duration of the week players could answer the Assassin's Creed III trivia questions and was not fixed by the time the quiz closed in preparation for the Assassin's Creed: Revelations set.
In the fifth Assassin's Creed II question, all but one of the images for the suggested Pieces of Eden that Adam and Eve stole from the Isu are incorrectly captioned. Only the Apple was ever identified as a Piece of Eden, with the armor derived from knowledge acquired from an Apple and the remaining two items being personal weapons wielded by Assassins. Oddly, this exact gallery arrangement was repeated in the fifth Brotherhood question asking which item Ezio lost in the Siege of Monteriggioni, but this time with the images matching the captions.
In the eighth Assassin's Creed II question, it asks for the audio excerpt's title from the soundtrack. While this piece "Salvation of Forli" was heard in the downloadable expansion Bonfire of the Vanities and the short film Assassin's Creed: Embers, it does not appear on the official soundtrack which only contains cues from the main game.
In the ninth Assassin's Creed II question, it asks for the date of the Papal conclave that resulted in Rodrigo Borgia being elected as Pope. While the official answers say that the date was 1486, this is incorrect. Historically, the College of Cardinals convened twice near that year, once in 1484 to elect Innocent III as Pope following Sixtus IV's death, and again in 1492 to vote Rodrigo into office.
The fifth Assassin's Creed question was supposed to have a slide overlay so that players could alternate between two different pictures at a time, similar to the mechanic in the last Assassin's Creed: Odyssey question that showed a young and old Kassandra. However, a website coding error resulted in only the second correct image being shown instead, removing the necessity of the first picture. It is uploaded here for completion's sake as it was still found in the site's files. Both images are reversed duplicates of another file on this site, since if players followed the traditional route along the Acre Citadel rooftops, the trio of untagged Crusaders will stand slightly to William's right.
In the sixth Assassin's Creed question, it asks for the identity of the person in a gallery who was not assigned to Altaïr's list of nine Templars. The only person whose picture was uncaptioned, Masun, is also coincidentally the correct answer, as he was instead executed by Al Mualim for opening Masyaf's gates to the Templars and forcing the Assassin to defend the fortress and its inhabitants.
The eighth Assassin's Creed question asks for the identity of the person who held the second Apple of Eden for over 40 years. Oddly, the second option is written simply as the nasab of "Ibn-La'Ahad" with no attached personal name, making it unclear which of the men in the Ibn-La'Ahad family it was supposed to be, whether it is Umar, Altaïr, Sef, or Darim. Another typographical error in the ninth question misspells the name of the city "Acre" as "acres", synonymous with the imperial unit of land area.
Files from the site's source code also contained multiple errors. Besides mistakenly misnaming the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and Origins PDF answer keys as each other, as noted below, perhaps the most notable mistake is the reward image for the Rogue questions. The Ezio Auditore bust given as the Revelations trivia prize was saved under the path "https://storage.googleapis.com/ac15-12trials/public/images/rewards/revelations.png" but also incorrectly under "rogue.png". This is incorrect, as the Rogue prize was to be an Assassin's Creed game per the contest rules.[1] Other inconsistencies include Ubisoft publishing all the official answers except for both the Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed questions, even up until the contest closed, and the fact that there are two sets of Valhalla score card images on the site. One set with male Eivor always displays 06/10 regardless whether the file name is anything from "ac15-12trails/shares/score/score-share-1.png" to "score-share-10.png", and the other with Eivor Varinsdottir properly displays the numbers 0–10 in accordance with the player's score.