Word Games and Cryptography

My latest discovery, thanks to Doug Peterson, is Crazy Phrase. Crazy Phrase is something of a variation of Wordle except that in Crazy Phrase the player is a phrase to discover. Clues are similar to Wordle with visual clues like green being a letter in the right place, yellow being in the wrong place but in the right word and blue being a good letter for the phrase but placed in the wrong word.

I was a bit intimidated when I first visited this new puzzle. I soon realized that some things involved in decoding cryptograms can be helpful. As with Wordle, looking for common letters is particularly helpful. With phrases we have the added option of looking for common words. This is especially true with two and three letter words. Words like “to”, “on”, “of” and the like can be very helpful in spotting the direction a phrase of going.

There is a proliferation of games on the internet inspired by Wordle these days. They offer a lot of possibilities for teaching problem solving. Creating new versions of games is an obvious programming project. Discussing these as cryptography related is an other possible topic. The use of computers to analyze strings is widely used for many applications so getting students to think about the process as used in games can be very helpful. And fun.