A sentence has been scrambled with a substitution cipher: every letter of the alphabet stands for a different one, and no letter stands for itself. Work out which code letter is which and the proverb or classic line appears. Solve the daily puzzle once a day or practice with random sentences, in English or Turkish.
How to play
The puzzle. Each puzzle is a sentence of 25 to 80 characters from a pool of public-domain text: traditional proverbs and idioms, and short lines by authors such as Aesop, Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin or Yunus Emre. The source is shown above the puzzle. Spaces and punctuation stay in place; only letters are encoded.
Placing letters. Tap a code letter in the puzzle (or use the arrow keys), then tap a letter on the keyboard or type it. Your guess appears above every occurrence of that code letter at once, and the selection jumps to the next empty code. Delete or Backspace removes the guess from the selected code.
Conflicts. You may place the same real letter under two different codes, but the cipher never does, so both are marked red and the status line warns you. Used letters are dimmed on the keyboard.
Letter frequency. The Letters button opens a table of every code letter with how often it appears, most common first. Tapping a row selects that code.
Finishing. The puzzle is solved when every code letter in the sentence carries the right letter. Reveal shows the solution after a confirmation and counts the puzzle as unsolved.
Hints. Up to three times per puzzle you can watch a short rewarded ad to reveal the most frequent code letter that is not yet correct. A revealed letter is locked, and a wrong guess elsewhere that used the same letter is cleared.
Score and time. The timer stops during ads and while the tab is hidden. The score for a solved puzzle is 1000 minus 200 per hint and 2 per second, never below zero.
Daily and practice. The daily puzzle is the same for everyone on the same day (midnight UTC) and can be played once. Practice mode gives a new random sentence whenever you want; leaving a practice puzzle after placing a letter counts as unsolved.
Stats. Puzzles played and the solve rate are kept separately for each language. The streak counts consecutive days with a solved daily puzzle; practice puzzles do not affect it.
Strategy
- Start with the one-letter words. In English they are almost always A or I; in Turkish, O.
- Look at the most frequent code letters in the Letters table. In English the commonest letters are E, T, A, O and N; in Turkish A, E, İ, N and R. A code that appears many times is rarely a rare letter.
- Use word shapes. A three-letter word with distinct letters that appears twice in English is often THE. A letter that doubles inside a word (as in “need” or “better”) is usually E, O, L, S or T.
- Apostrophes are a gift: in English the letter after one is nearly always S or T, and “n’t” fixes two letters at once.
- Fill the short function words first, then read the partial sentence aloud. Proverbs follow familiar rhythms, and the source tag tells you whether to expect a saying or an author’s line.
- Red letters mean two codes share one guess. One of them is wrong; check which word reads better without it.
If you enjoy Cryptogram, try Five Letters or Hangman next.
