Game Time

SLAH enters the wide world of Saratoga-related cryptoquips.

Imagine this: It’s 1985, and you’re reading the Sunday paper while sipping your coffee on a warm spring morning. You flip to the comics section, do a half-laugh at the Charlie Brown strip, and turn the page. Facing you is a mess of letters that you’re supposed to decode into a coherent phrase. You pick up a pencil—an actual #2 pencil—and put on your thinking cap.

Now, while we can’t bring you tales of Lucy and Linus and Snoopy, we can give you a little bit of that bygone bliss by way of a nice, juicy cryptoquip, a type of puzzle that assigns each letter a different letter. When doing a cryptoquip, your job is to figure out which letter stands for each other letter in the puzzle, and in doing so decipher the phrase. If Z represents T once, it will represent T throughout the puzzle. So, for example:

OK, stay with me—that was a short example, and cryptoquips are actually easier when they’re longer and you have more to work with. Plus, oftentimes you’ll get a clue, such as, for the above example, L=S.

So, without further ado, I present SLAH’s first-ever Saratoga cryptoquip. Here are some tactics to try, if you’re a first-time cryptoquipper. Think it’s too easy? Let us know in the comments. Think it’s too hard? Maybe you don’t want to broadcast your failure—so shoot us an email at editorial@saratogaliving.com. We make our Monday Game Day puzzles for you, so would love to hear your thoughts. And don’t forget to become a paid subscriber to get the answer sent directly to your inbox tomorrow morning. See you then.

Clue: L=N