From the Dark Side
by Tiny Ruisch
Android phones and tablets are the perfect size for playing some of my favorite games. Most of the time, it is some type of a word game. In the past, I’ve reviewed Wordiest, 7 Little Words, Monkey Wrench, Crossword Puzzle Free and many others. I’ve recently found another word game that I’ve played daily since I installed it.
Cryptogram for Android is a puzzle where a sentence or phrase has been encoded by substituting the actual letters of the sentence with different letters. The challenge of the puzzle is to decode the sentence to reveal the original English sentence. The cipher used to encrypt the text is a simple substitution of letters and is easy enough that the cryptogram can be solved by hand. The solution to each puzzle is a message by one of hundreds of different poets, preachers and prophets. There are thousands of puzzles to solve.
The features of the game as listed in the Play Store are:
• Hundreds and hundreds of hand-picked puzzles without any religious or political bias;
• It works completely offline, so you can enjoy some brain teasers while traveling;
• Compare statistics about how well you’re doing with friends;
• Keep track of which puzzles you’ve solved already and revisit them;
• Get help by revealing letters or showing hints.
The game is easy to play. As you progress in the game, the puzzles get harder. The quote topic and author name can often give you clues to what some of the words might be. You can get hints by revealing letters. As I write this article, the Play Store has 14,209 reviews with an average rating of 4.6. The puzzle author is very responsive to reviews.
Did I mention the best feature? Cryptogram for Android is completely free and has no ads. There is a donate button in the settings menu. You can download Cryptogram from the Google Play Store. If you like word puzzles, I highly recommend this one.
Thanks for reading.