Every letter has moved the same distance along the alphabet.
The slider is a picture of that: the top row is what is written in
the message, and the row underneath is what those letters
really are.
Press ▶ and watch the bottom row move one place along. Keep
going until the message turns into words. You can also drag the
slider with a finger.
Nothing here is timed and nothing here counts, so press whatever
you like.
Same idea as the warm up, but these messages are long and the
slide can be as far as 25 — so sweeping through the lot is slow.
Find one letter you are sure of instead. A word on its own is
almost always A or I. A three-letter word turning up
over and over is almost always THE. Tap that letter in the
message, tap what you think it really is, and the whole slider
jumps to match. Two taps and it is open.
Guessing wrong costs nothing — the message just stays nonsense, so
try another letter. Only BREAK IT costs you, so read it
before you press it.
On a laptop the arrow keys slide it, you can type a
letter instead of tapping, and enter is BREAK IT.
No pattern this time. Every letter stands for a different one,
picked at random, so there is no slider that can help — you have to
work them out one at a time.
Tap a letter — either up in the message, or in the strip of
26 below it, which is much easier to hit — then tap what you
think it really is. Every copy of that letter changes at once,
all the way through, which is the thing that makes this possible
at all.
On THE LAST WORD, every message finishes with the same
word and you are shown what it is. Press WRITE IT IN FOR ME
and those letters fill themselves in everywhere else they turn up
in the message. That is your way in.
Stuck? GIVE ME A LETTER hands over the most useful one you
have not got yet. It adds seconds to your time, so it is a real
choice and not a cheat.
If two different coded letters end up meaning the same thing,
both of them turn red. That cannot be the answer, so one of
them is wrong. RUB OUT clears the letter you are working on,
CLEAR ALL starts the message again, and UNDO always
works.
On a laptop you can type instead of tapping,
backspace rubs out and Ctrl-Z undoes.
Except in the warm up, the clock runs across the whole pack and
stops while you are reading a message you have just broken.