We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.

Unexpectedly today SquareEnix not only announced but released a remake of the first Mystery Dungeon game, plus the first of the new Rifftrax Experiment episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 hit theaters, so it’s been a full day on top of recovering from DragonCon.

But I just noticed that Roger Dodger over on Metafilter posted a link to a daily cryptogram puzzle, and that seems like the kind of thing all of you may enjoy, maybe long enough to tide you over to tomorrow.

Cryptograms are a pretty old concept, taking the old idea of a Caesar cypher, a code where each letter throughout a message is replaced with a different letter consistently throughout the whole code, and making it into a puzzle. Although true Caesar cyphers shift the letters down the alpha instead of arbitrarily as in most cryptograms. By default punctuation and spaces are revealed from the start, but if you like your puzzles extra hard you can disable even these helps.

If you want a few tips?

• Single letters are probably A, or once in a while I.
• Every word is bound to have at least one A, E, I, O, U or possibly Y.
• The most common three-letter word is, of course, THE.
• There are only so many two-letter words likely to appear in a puzzle like this.
• Double letters are great for narrowing things down. Also be on the lookout for possible plurals.

rodneylives