Hard Cryptograms
Type your best guess for each letter. Hint letters are struck in brass; your guesses propagate to every matching code letter. Solve it all and your score appears.
Popular Puzzles
Hard Cryptograms
No free letters. No mercy. Bare ciphertext and the Czar's silence.
Expert mode is the puzzle as it was meant to be met: a wall of substituted letters and nothing else. No letters revealed, no scaffolding, no charity. What you bring to it is method, and method is the entire point.
How to break one with no help at all
Count first. Tally every cipher letter and rank them. In English, E is about 12.7% of all letters and T about 9.1% — on a quote of any length, your most frequent cipher letter is very likely one of those two. That single count is worth more than an hour of guessing.
Then attack the structure. Find the one- and two-letter words. Find a word with a doubled letter. Find an apostrophe — the letter after it is almost always T, S, RE, LL or VE, and any of those is a free foothold. Look for a word whose letters repeat in a distinctive shape: 1-2-3-1 is very often THAT, and cracking it hands you four letters, three of them among the most common in the language.
Above all, verify. In expert mode there is nothing to catch your mistakes, so a guess that produces an impossible word anywhere else in the quote is simply wrong, and carrying it forward will cost you more time than starting over. Confirm every letter against the whole ciphertext before you commit.
If it truly will not fall, the Czar permits one indignity: Agent Vera will break it for you in about a second, and nobody need ever know. Or study the seven tactics and come back for it.
Questions for the Czar
What makes expert cryptograms harder?
Casual mode reveals a portion of the letters before you start and offers hints. Expert mode gives you the raw ciphertext and nothing else — no revealed letters, no scaffolding. The cipher is identical; only the assistance changes.
How do I solve a cryptogram with no hints?
Start with letter frequency: count which cipher letter appears most often, because E and T are by far the most common letters in English. Then work the short words, the doubled letters and the apostrophes. Structure survives the cipher even though the letters do not.
Is there a time limit?
None. Take an hour if you like. Your solve is scored against other players when you finish, but nothing is running against you while you think.