Peel is a daily deobfuscation puzzle you play in the browser. Each day it gives you one
real obfuscated one-liner, a short shell or JavaScript command buried under a stack of
reversible encodings, and asks you to reveal the plaintext underneath. You solve it by
choosing decode operations from a toolbox: Base64, hex, ROT13, URL-encoding, string
reversal, and a syntactic eval()/atob() unwrap. Every operation
runs for real on the current text, so the string you see is always the genuine result of
the moves you have made, never a canned animation.
The goal is the fewest moves. A correct decode peels one layer and advances you toward the answer; an off-path guess that still applies counts as a move but does not get you closer; a decode that cannot apply is rejected and the board shakes. A live timer tracks your solve and freezes the moment the plaintext appears. When you win, Peel builds a spoiler-free result grid, one colored square per move, that you can share without giving the puzzle away.
= is usually Base64, pairs of hex digits
are hex, and %20 style escapes are URL-encoding. Trial and error is a valid
strategy, it just costs moves.
eval() unwrap is purely syntactic: it strips the wrapper text to
expose the inner string and never runs anything. Peel has no backend and executes none
of the puzzle content.