Guide · Updated July 14, 2026
Keycaps & the Keyboard Collection
The whole game is in the name: every keycap belongs somewhere, and your job is to complete the collection. Here's how the board is organised, how to read caps fast, and what it takes to earn the game's badge.
The goal: a complete keyboard
Place the Keycaps! hands you the keyboard equivalent of a dumped jigsaw puzzle. The developers' own one-liner — "sort a pile of keycaps to complete your keyboard collection" — is the entire win condition. Every loose cap has exactly one home, and a filled board is a finished collection.
Because the game is in beta, the exact boards and cap pools can change between patches (the [SOUNDS!] update is the current version). What doesn't change is the skill: recognising a keycap's legend and knowing where it lives.
Know your keycap zones
Real keyboards — and the game's boards follow the same logic — group caps into zones. Learn these five and no legend will ever stump you:
| Zone | What's in it | Sorting notes |
|---|---|---|
| Letter block | A–Z across three rows (QWERTY top, home row, bottom row) | The bulk of the pile. Memorise QWERTY order and you can place these without hunting. |
| Number row | 1–0 plus their shifted symbols (!, @, #…) | Printed with two legends — number below, symbol above. Don't confuse 0 with the letter O. |
| Modifiers | Shift, CTRL, Alt, Caps Lock, Tab, Enter, Backspace | The big, wide caps. Easiest wins on the board — place them first as landmarks. |
| Space bar | The one-of-a-kind giant | Unmistakable. If it's in the pile, it's your fastest possible placement. |
| Punctuation & extras | Comma, period, slashes, brackets, quotes | The lookalike zone — semicolon vs colon, comma vs period. Slow down here. |
Reading legends like a sorter
- Size first. Before reading anything: is the cap wide? Then it's a modifier or the space bar, and your options just collapsed to a handful of slots.
- Letters go by neighbourhood. Don't memorise 26 positions — memorise clusters. QWERTY's rhythm ("Q-W-E-R-T-Y" sung once) is genuinely enough to navigate the top row.
- Two-legend caps are number-row caps. A cap showing both 5 and % can only live in one place.
- When in doubt, CTRL-aim. Unlock the mouse (see controls) and hover the candidate slot before committing.
The Sorted All Keycaps badge
Place the Keycaps! currently has a single badge — and it's the game's whole thesis:
| Badge | Requirement | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Sorted All Keycaps | "You have sorted every keycap!" — official badge description | 38,000+ players had earned it as of July 14, 2026 |
Three things to know about the badge run:
- "Every keycap" means every keycap. A 95%-complete board earns nothing. The last stragglers are usually caps thrown (Q!) to the map's edges — sweep walls and corners before assuming you're done.
- Crowds help. Up to 25 players share a server, and a busy lobby clears piles fast. The badge isn't solo-gated, so riding a full server is legitimate strategy.
- It's earnable right now. With ~38k awards against 1.4M+ visits, the badge is uncommon but far from impossible — it rewards finishing, not grinding. Most players who miss it simply stop before the final sweep.