Decipherly | tentenbits.com

Decipherly's Modes screen listing Cryptograms, Word Ladder and Word Search — Three kinds of puzzle, each with a daily.

A cryptogram of an Ernest Hemingway quote, partly solved to read THE _ORLD _REA_S E_ER_ONE, AND, with the Decoder Ring sheet open below it, listing each cipher letter and the letter guessed for it — The Decoder Ring lists every letter you've worked out.

A Word Ladder from WORK to PLAY with a par of 6, three steps in at PORK, PERK and PEAK, with the field for the next word above the keyboard — Change one letter at a time to reach the target word.

An 11 by 11 Makers of History word search with five of its ten words found and crossed off the list, and a hint lighting the first letter of BOIS — A hint lights the first letter of a word you haven't found.

The Solved sheet over a finished ladder from FROM to PLAY, showing 4 steps, a par of 4 and no hints, marked Beat par, with Next Puzzle and Done buttons — Every mode ends on the same short summary.

The Stats screen with a one-day streak on a seven-day strip and the Cryptogram tab open: one puzzle solved, a best time of 2:41, no hints, and 1 of 834 quotes solved — A streak across all three modes, and stats for each.

Features

Cryptograms: decode one of 834 quotes, each in a letter-substitution cipher
A Decoder Ring, a letter-frequency chart, and a letter picker that shows how common each letter is in English
Word Ladder: 110 four-letter ladders in Daily, Easy and Medium packs, each with a par
Word Search: four themed word lists plus Mixed, in Easy, Medium and Hard grids, or a custom grid
A daily puzzle in every mode, the same for everyone, worked out from the date with no server
Hints, undo and start over in every mode
A hard mode for cryptograms that doesn't mark wrong letters in red
Stats for each mode, and a streak across all three
iPhone and iPad, with VoiceOver labels and support for larger text
No account, no ads, no tracking: everything stays on your device

Decipherly is a word puzzle app for iPhone and iPad with three kinds of puzzle: cryptograms, word ladders and word searches. Each mode has a daily puzzle, and everyone playing on the same day gets the same one. There are also packs and themes to play at any time. Decipherly is currently in TestFlight beta.

How it plays

Cryptograms. Each puzzle is a quote in which every letter has been swapped for another. Tap a letter and pick what you think it stands for, and your guess fills in everywhere that letter appears. A wrong guess shows in red unless hard mode is on. Three tools help: a chart of the letters that appear most often in the puzzle, a letter picker that shows how common each letter is in English, and the Decoder Ring, which lists every substitution you’ve made so far. A hint fills in one letter.

Word Ladder. Get from the start word to the target by changing one letter at a time, and every step must be a real word. Each ladder’s par is the fewest steps it can be done in. A hint shows one letter of the next word on a shortest ladder.

Word Search. Find the listed words in a grid of letters by dragging across them, or by tapping a word’s first and last letters. Easy grids are 8×8 with six words across and down. Medium grids are 11×11 with ten words, diagonals included. Hard grids are 15×15 with eighteen words in every direction, backwards too. A custom grid lets you choose the theme, the size, the directions, the number of words, and whether the word list is hidden. A hint lights the first letter of a word you haven’t found.

Dailies and stats. You can replay a daily, but it’s recorded once. The Stats tab counts a streak of days on which you solved anything, and shows each mode’s own streak, times, hints, and how far through its puzzles you are. After 20 solves in a mode, it compares your last ten with the ten before.

Under the hood

SwiftUI for every screen, on iOS 17 and later, with a sidebar layout for cryptograms on iPad
All the puzzle logic in a local Swift package, kept apart from the app and tested without a simulator
One protocol per puzzle mode, so each mode plugs into the same shell, controls and win sheet
Seeded daily puzzles: the date picks each mode’s puzzle and the cryptogram’s cipher, so everyone gets the same daily with no server
Ladder pars and hints from a breadth-first search over a dictionary of 3,903 four-letter words
Word search grids generated from a seed, with the word count capped so every grid can fit its words
Progress and settings saved as small JSON files on the device, with no database and no network code
Zero third-party dependencies and about 255 tests

How I built it

I built Decipherly with Claude Code, using the same spec-driven workflow as my other apps. It began as a rebuild of an earlier cryptogram game written in p5.js for the web. Each feature, from Word Ladder to the stats screen, started as a written design spec and implementation plan, and each plan was then carried out task by task.

Between May and October 2026, that came to about 240 commits, about 11,500 lines of Swift, and 12 design specs.