A game apparatus including a puzzle and a conforming device. The puzzle includes ciphertext indicia and a number of designated spaces corresponding with the ciphertext for displaying a developing solution. The ciphertext is a message encrypted according to some substitutional and/or transpositional encipherment scheme. At each stage of solving, the ciphertext and developing solution show what has been correctly solved and what remains to be solved. The conforming device verifies the correctness of correct guesses and corrects incorrect guesses without prejudicing future guesses. There are manifold types of messages, encipherment schemes, developing solutions and conforming devices. Some puzzles and conforming devices are made by a computerized method. The game can be played by one player or several players in competition. It can be played using a game board or other apparatus or by using a computer with an interactive computer program. To solve a puzzle, a puzzle solver first forms a guess-pair. Typically, a guess-pair is a plain character and a cipher character that could be the plain character's substitute. The conforming device is used to verify the correctness of the guess-pair, or if it is wrong, to obtain a correction. The verified or corrected guess-pair is then used to update the developing solution. These three steps are repeated at least once. There are various scoring rules for various versions of the game.
展开▼
