Make a cipher puzzle
Type your secret message, then choose a shift or press Random shift. The generator produces cipher text, a puzzle card you can copy and share, and an answer key that you keep to yourself.
Formatting options
- Keep spaces and punctuation: easier to solve, because word lengths show.
- Blocks of five: the classic cipher look. Letters only, in groups of five, which hides word lengths.
- Letters only, no spaces: one continuous string, the hardest to read by eye.
- Capitals: output in upper case, as in traditional ciphers.
The puzzle card
The card is a short block of text with a title, the cipher text, and an optional hint that states the shift. Paste it into a worksheet, a message, a treasure hunt clue or a game.
Ideas for using it
- Classroom lessons on codes, history or modular arithmetic.
- Escape room and treasure hunt clues.
- Geocaching hints and party games.
- Practice for learning to break ciphers by frequency analysis.
Tips
Choose a message long enough to be fun to solve, at least a sentence or two, because very short messages have several plausible readings. Solvers can check their work with the Caesar cipher decoder.
For one-off encryption with a chosen shift, use the Caesar cipher tool. For ciphers with other alphabets, try the shift cipher. Learn the background in the guide.