How to Solve the Braille Cipher

A symbol cipher replaces each letter with a mark — a shape, a pattern of dots, a pair of flags. Nothing is scrambled and nothing is shifted, so once you have the key you can read the message straight off.

How to recognise it

You can see at a glance that it isn't letters. That is the whole tell, and it is also why these are the friendliest ciphers to learn: the difficulty is looking the marks up, not reasoning about them.

Braille Six dot positions per cell. Which ones are raised is the letter.

The full Braille alphabet

All twenty-six letters and the mark that stands for each. This is the same table our puzzles are drawn from, so anything you decode here will match anything you decode on the daily cipher.

• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• X
• Y
• Z

A worked example

Each letter has become a mark. Nothing is scrambled and nothing is shifted: find the key to the symbols and you can read it straight off. This one is Braille. Six dot positions per cell. Which ones are raised is the letter. Match the first three marks against the key and they resolve to T R E. The answer was TREASURE MAP.

Working one out from scratch

Work with the alphabet table below open in front of you. Copy the marks out in order first and translate second — most mistakes on a symbol cipher are transcription mistakes, not decoding ones.