I joined very recently (yesterday)

[ibaz]

I joined this challenge very recently (luckily right before any of the marked challenges started!) Could anyone give me tips on what to catch up on and help me? thanks! <3 GOOD LUCK EVERYONE

[upsidedown]

I’d suggest having a go at the challenges that have come out already (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B). Pen and paper can get you very far and is great for building intuition – if you’re feeling adventurous you could try writing a Python program to decrypt or break some of the existing ciphertexts. @Puzzling_Pelican recently published a guide to solving Caesar ciphers in Python which you may find helpful. This week’s challenge is often a substitution or block transposition cipher – so worth reading up on those.

[vercingetorix]

To add to the post from @upsidedown, it is worth doing challenges 1A-2B to get a sense of the storyline, as names can be really useful for cribs at the start and end of letters. Good luck!

[Crackerjack]

Seconding the advice above! Welcome aboard and I hope you’ve been enjoying the story and challenges so far! If you’d just like some general advice on how to approach ciphers rather than a ‘how to crack ciphers’ guide, I’ve written some stuff that Harry kindly put on the News page: https://www.cipherchallenge.org/crackerjacks-guide-to-getting-unstuck/

I hope you find something helpful there. Good luck and have fun!!

[ibaz]

Thanks guys – I have certainly done that! I was wondering if there was an official list of the ciphers that could be used, or could it be any cipher in the history of humanity? lol Thanks for the advice – have fun guys!

[Crackerjack]

There isn’t an ‘official’ list to my knowledge, but you can certainly look at past year’s challenge archives to see what has been before. I’ll leave a link to the unofficial archive here (thanks to madness!)

[Author]

Posts