Daily Cryptogram: Play a Free Puzzle Online

A cryptogram is a short message where every letter has been swapped for a different one, and your job is to swap them back. No key, no clue list, just the pattern of the language underneath. A new one lands at Murdcrypt on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, free, and it takes about ten minutes.

Play today’s cryptogram

Today’s case is live now. Five encrypted statements, one lying witness, and a single verdict that locks for the day.

It is free, it runs in a browser, and it needs no account. If you would rather learn the method first, the sections below cover what a cryptogram is, how it differs from the puzzles your newspaper calls something else, and how to open one by hand.

What is a cryptogram?

A message encrypted with a simple substitution: every A in the original becomes the same letter throughout, every B becomes another, and the mapping holds for the whole message. Nothing is added and nothing is moved.

That is why cryptograms are solvable without a key. English has habits. E is the commonest letter by a wide margin, one-letter words are almost always A or I, and a three-letter word that keeps returning is usually THE. Those habits survive the disguise, and they are the footholds every solver starts from.

The puzzle is short on purpose. A cryptogram is usually one sentence, which is long enough to carry the statistical tells and short enough to finish over a coffee.

Cryptogram, cryptoquote, cryptoquip: what is the difference?

They are the same puzzle. The difference is what the hidden message turns out to be.

Cryptoquote and Cryptoquip are branded newspaper puzzles, both distributed by King Features Syndicate, which is why you meet them in a print paper rather than as generic terms. Solve one and you have solved all three: the encryption is identical simple substitution in every case, and the technique does not change.

The only practical difference is the payoff. A cryptoquote rewards you with something somebody once said. A cryptoquip rewards you with a groan. A cryptogram can hand you either, or a line of testimony from a murder case, which is what happens here.

How do you solve a cryptogram?

Start here, in this order.

1. Count the letters. The commonest symbol is probably E, then T, then A. This alone rarely finishes a puzzle and it almost always starts one.
2. Attack the short words. A single-letter word is A or I. Two-letter words are a small closed set: OF, TO, IN, IT, IS, AS, AT, ON.
3. Find the pattern words. A word with a repeated letter in a distinctive position narrows the field fast. THAT, LITTLE, PEOPLE all have shapes you learn to recognize.
4. Test before you commit. A guess that produces an impossible letter run three words later was the wrong guess. Undo it early rather than building on it.

The full method, with a worked example solved start to finish, is in our guide to solving cryptograms.

Where can you play a free cryptogram online?

Here, and the puzzle is a murder case rather than a quotation.

Every Murdcrypt case gives you five witness statements, all encrypted with the same cipher that day. You decode them, then work out which of the five is lying, then file one verdict naming that witness. One verdict per day, and it locks once filed.

The cipher rotates, so the puzzle is not the same shape from one case to the next. Some days it is a Caesar shift, some days the alphabet is mirrored, some days the letters become numbers. The cipher library explains each system if you want to know what you are looking at before you start.

Every past case stays playable in the archive, so a solver who arrives midweek is not starting from nothing.