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Cryptle
#30
· Tue 29 Sep 2026
This one is from the archive. Play it for practice — past puzzles never
count toward a streak. Today’s cipher is here.
3 guesses to crack the cipher.
One cipher each day.
How to play »
The block on the page is an ordinary English sentence with a cipher laid
over it. Every letter is still in there. Your job is to read it.
We tell you which cipher it is
Today it’s Playfair, and the key is
keyword QUARRY .
The work is the decoding, not guessing what you’re looking at.
Type the decoded message
Capitals, spaces and punctuation are all ignored —
the third stone and
THETHIRDSTONE both count.
3 guesses, then the day is done
A wrong guess tells you whether your answer is even the right length,
and which part of your method to doubt.
Solve it and your streak grows
Miss a day, or run out of guesses, and it goes back to zero. That’s
the whole prize — there’s nothing to win but the run itself.
A new one lands at midnight
Past days stay playable in the
archive ,
but practice never counts toward a streak.
Never solved one before? The
guides
walk through every cipher we use, one at a time.
Got it
Playfair
keyword QUARRY
VG DX FK GK OF YQ
Q
U
A
R
Y
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
K
L
M
N
O
P
S
T
V
W
X
Z
Need a nudge?
Letters travel in pairs across a 5×5 square. Same row, step right; same column, step down; otherwise swap corners. I and J share a cell.
Learn the method:
how to solve playfair
The answer
THE WELL IS DRY
How it works
This is the kind of cipher that turns up inside real treasure hunts, where the encoding is a layer rather than the whole puzzle. This one is Playfair. The key: keyword QUARRY. Letters travel in pairs across a 5×5 square. Same row, step right; same column, step down; otherwise swap corners. I and J share a cell. Apply the key to the first three letters and they resolve to T H E. The answer was THE WELL IS DRY.
Today’s cipher →
Ready for a real one?
These are the same techniques our monthly hunts are built on
One hunt a month, a real prize pool, and puzzles that take more than a
coffee break. Members get every monthly hunt included.
See membership