Solving Guides

A cipher is only half the work. The other half is method: knowing where to start on a page of nonsense, which letters to guess first, and how to tell a real foothold from a coincidence.

These guides teach the craft rather than any one system. Frequency counts, pattern words, the short words that give themselves away, and the discipline of testing a guess before you build on it. The techniques are old and they still work. Al-Kindi wrote the first surviving description of frequency analysis in ninth-century Baghdad, and every solver since has used some version of what he set down. Learn them once and no substitution cipher stays closed to you for long.