TownCipher

TownCipher is a hands-on cryptography app for anyone curious about how secret writing actually works. Instead of explaining ciphers in the abstract, it hands you thirty working cipher machines — Caesar, Vigenere, Playfair, Enigma, Pigpen, ADFGVX and more — and lets you encode, decode and break real messages with them. Every cipher comes with the history of who used it, what it protected, and how it was eventually broken. Open the app and you land on today's decrypt: a single ciphertext waiting to be cracked, drawn from a rotating pool of six hundred puzzles. Solve it and your streak grows. From there you can browse the full cipher library, read the story behind any method, then put it to work in the Workbench — type a message, turn the key, and watch the ciphertext build letter by letter. When you want to be tested rather than to play, the Trials take over: five graded challenges per cipher that carry you from White belt to Black. KEY FEATURES ✓ 30 working cipher engines — substitution, polyalphabetic, transposition, combined, mechanical and special, each fully implemented, not simulated ✓ A daily decrypt with streak tracking, so there is always one puzzle waiting ✓ 150 graded trials — five tiers per cipher, with progressive hints when you get stuck, and a belt to earn for every cipher you master ✓ Cipher Workbench — encode or decode anything you like, adjust the key live, and copy the result or keep it ✓ 30 famous cases, from the Babington Plot to the Zimmermann Telegram, told in full rather than summarised ✓ A pantheon of 15 cryptanalysts and a 40-point timeline running from the Spartan scytale to Bletchley Park ✓ A 150-entry glossary that is linked directly into the reading — tap any term mid-sentence to see what it means ✓ Sandbox notes — write your own encoded messages and keep them HOW IT WORKS 1. Solve today's decrypt on the home screen to start your streak. 2. Browse the Library and read how a cipher works and where it came from. 3. Take that cipher's Trials, one tier at a time, to earn its belt. 4. Use the Workbench to encode your own messages, and save them to the Sandbox. WHY TOWNCIPHER Everything runs on your device. There is no account to create, no sign-in, no ads, and no subscription — the entire library, all 150 trials and all 600 daily puzzles are included and available offline. The cipher engines are real implementations, so anything you encode here can be decoded anywhere else by the same method. It is built to be read as much as played: the historical writing is long-form and the glossary is woven through it.