Terminal

in the film "The Imitation Game", English mathematician and logician, Alan Turing, helped crack the Enigma code during World War II. Now, you can too.


TERMINAL is a strategic word-puzzle game in which players are tasked with cracking randomly encoded messages (cryptograms). Messages may contain inspirational quotes from great minds of the last century, or insights from pop culture icons.


The letters in the encoded messages are scrambled, such that all A's might be B's, all B's might be C's, etc.


The lines below show a hypothetical message and its encoded counterpart. The first line is the actual message, which is hidden from the player. The second line is the encoded message.


she sells sea shells by the sea
abc acdda ace abcdda fg hbc ace


By analyzing the encoded message, players can easily find patterns. For example, a player might choose to start with 3 letter words and deduce that "hbc" is the word "the". It would follow that the letter "c" in the word "acdda" is really the letter "e". The fact that the "c" is followed by two d's might lead the player to conclude that the "d" is really an "l". The word "acdda" also starts and ends with the same letter ("a"). Given this, the player might conclude that the "a" is an "s", and that the word is "sells".


Having come to the above conclusions, the word "abcdda" would spell "s_ells" (wherein only the second letter is missing). At that point, the player should choose the letter that makes the most sense - e.g. an "m" would spell "smells", a "w" would spell "swells", an "h" would spell "shells", etc.


Players can use the "Check" button to gauge how close they are to decoding the message. Doing so tells them how many letters they've gotten right, but does not tell them which letters those are. To help them along, players are also given a free letter of their choice per encoded message.


Decoded messages are added to players’ vaults, and can be revisited at any time.