pips&pegs

Daily Cryptogram

— the same puzzle everyone else is looking at. New one at midnight.

How to crack a cryptogram

Every letter has been swapped for another, consistently. You are looking for the pattern, and English gives you an enormous amount of help.

  1. Count the letters. The commonest letter in English is E, then T, A, O, I, N. The commonest symbol in the puzzle is very probably one of those — and the frequency table above the keyboard does the counting for you.
  2. Find the short words. A one-letter word is A or I, and there's no third option. A three-letter word that appears again and again is almost always THE.
  3. Look at the shapes. A word with a repeated letter in a distinctive position — like _ E _ _ E R — narrows down fast. Double letters at the end of a word are usually LL, SS, EE or OO.
  4. Guess, and check the consequences. This is the real skill. Place a letter, and see what it does to every other word in the puzzle. If it produces a word with no vowels, you're wrong, and you've learned something.
  5. No letter ever stands for itself. Guaranteed by the generator, which means you can rule that out for free, every time.

Why the same puzzle for everybody?

Because a puzzle you can grind out fifty times in an afternoon isn't a habit — it's a time sink, and you'll be bored of it by Thursday. One puzzle a day, the same one everybody else is staring at, is a completely different thing: it's a small daily appointment, and the streak is what makes you keep it.

The puzzle is generated from today's date using a deterministic shuffle, which means there's no server involved at all. Everyone gets the same cipher because everyone's calendar agrees, not because a database told them to. That's also why this page keeps working on a plane.

More to play

KlondikeThe solitaire everybody means. CribbageAgainst an opponent that counts. ReversiCorners decide everything.

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How to solve a cryptogram — a beginner's method