Cryptogram

How to play Cryptogram

A cryptogram is a short message that has been scrambled with a simple secret code, and your job is to crack it. Every letter of the original sentence has been swapped for a different letter — the same swap used everywhere — so the text looks like nonsense until you work out which letter stands for which. In this game the hidden message is always a short, well-known proverb or an original saying, so once a few letters fall into place the meaning starts to shine through. You decode the puzzle right in your browser by tapping a coded letter and choosing the real letter you think it represents; that guess instantly fills in every place the coded letter appears. Solve the whole sentence to win, and the faster you crack it — with fewer hints and fewer wrong guesses — the higher your ranked score.

The goal

Your goal is to reveal the original sentence hidden inside the coded text. The puzzle is solved the moment every coded letter has been matched to the correct real letter and the full message reads as ordinary English. There is exactly one correct solution for each puzzle. You are racing the clock and your own accuracy: a quick, clean solve with no hints scores best, while spending time, taking hints, or entering wrong letters all chip away at your final score.

What is a substitution cipher?

A substitution cipher is one of the oldest and simplest secret codes. To make one, you shuffle the alphabet and pair each real letter with a different code letter — A might become Q, B might become F, and so on. Crucially, the pairing is consistent: if A is written as Q anywhere in the message, then every A becomes Q and every Q hides an A. In this game no letter is ever coded as itself, so a coded R never stands for a real R. Spaces, apostrophes, commas and full stops are left untouched, which is a huge help: the gaps still show you where the words begin and end, and the punctuation gives away short common words and contractions.

How to play

• Read the coded message. Each coded letter sits below a blank line where your guess will appear; the small grey letter is the code, and the space above it is where your real-letter guess goes.
• Tap or click any coded letter to select it. Every copy of that coded letter is highlighted so you can see how often it appears.
• Choose the real letter you think it stands for — tap a letter on the on-screen keyboard, or just press it on a physical keyboard. Your guess instantly fills every place that coded letter appears. Press Clear (or Backspace) to erase it again.
• Use the Hint button if you get stuck. A hint reveals one correct letter for you, but it costs points, so use it sparingly. The frequency panel shows how many times each coded letter appears, which is the single most useful clue for a beginner.
• Keep going until the whole sentence reads correctly. When the last letter clicks into place you win, the proverb and its source are shown, and your score is submitted. Tap New Puzzle at any time for a fresh sentence and a brand-new code.

How to crack the code

• Start with letter frequency. In English the letter E is by far the most common, followed by letters like T, A, O, I and N. Turn on the frequency panel, find the coded letter that appears most often, and E or T is a very good first guess for it.
• Attack the short words. A one-letter word is almost always A or I. Two- and three-letter words are usually common glue words such as OF, TO, IN, IS, IT, THE, AND or YOU — spotting THE early cracks three letters at once.
• Let apostrophes talk. A letter standing alone after an apostrophe is very often S, T or D (as in it’s, don’t, we’d), and a short ending after an apostrophe points at forms like ’T or ’S. These tiny clues unlock some of the hardest letters.
• Look for doubled letters and common endings. Double letters are most often LL, EE, SS, OO or TT, and words frequently end in -ING, -ED, -LY, -ER or -TION. Once you have a few letters, the shape of a half-finished word often reveals the rest.
• Guess and confirm. Pencil in a promising letter, then read the nearby words: if they start to make sense you are on the right track, and if they turn to gibberish, clear the letter and try another. Every correct letter you place makes the next one easier.

Difficulty levels

Easy puzzles use the shortest sayings and give you one free starter letter to get you moving — perfect for learning the ropes. Medium puzzles are longer with no free letters, and Hard puzzles use the longest sentences with the widest range of letters and, again, no starter help. Longer messages are actually easier to reason about in one way — more letters means more frequency clues and more common words — but they demand more patience. Pick the level that suits you from the selector; each level keeps its own best score.

How scoring works

Cryptogram is a leaderboard game, and higher scores are better. Each solve starts from a base value that depends on the level — 6,000 points on Easy, 9,000 on Medium and 12,000 on Hard. From that base the game subtracts one point for every second you take, five hundred points for every hint you reveal, and one hundred points for every wrong letter you enter. The final score is never allowed to drop below one point, and it always fits within the leaderboard limit. In short: solve quickly, lean on hints as little as possible, and think before you type, because a fast and accurate solve on Hard is worth the most of all.

Frequently asked questions