Cryptographic guessing game

A game apparatus including a puzzle and a conforming means. 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 means verifies the correctness of correct guesses and corrects incorrect guesses without prejudicing future guesses. Manifold types of messages, encipherment schemes, developing solutions and conforming means are disclosed, as well as a computerized method of making some puzzles and conforming means. The game can be played by one player or several players in competition. 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 means 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 usually until the puzzle is solved or ready to be solved in one outright guess. Various scoring rules for one or more puzzle solvers are disclosed.