Time Cryptograms
Quotes about time, encoded as substitution ciphers and laid out for paper — big type, a blank under every letter, answers on their own page.
Twelve quotations about hours, days and putting things off, running from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca through Shakespeare, Franklin, Emerson, Dickens and Twain. Two of them say almost the same thing eight hundred years apart, which is the sort of accident that makes a subject set worth building: Franklin's line about tomorrow and the older proverb behind it sit on the same sheet, encoded with different keys, so they do not look alike until you have solved both.
Time words are short and repetitive — day, hour, year, late, soon, now — and they repeat within a single quotation more often than most vocabulary does. That gives you repeated shapes early, which is a genuine advantage; the compensating difficulty is that several of these lines are built as a comparison, so a wrong guess in the first clause propagates cleanly into the second and looks plausible all the way.
A good set for a waiting room, ironically enough. The shortest is forty-one letters and the longest eighty-two, so a sheet takes about as long as an appointment runs late.
This section: 217 quotations, written between 163 BC and 1941, 40 to 140 letters long, graded easy / medium / hard / expert. Voices you will meet: Abraham Lincoln, Aesop, Alexander Pope, Alfred Tennyson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and 61 more.
The 37 sheets
Set 1
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 2
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 3
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 4
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 5
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard
Set 6
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 7
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 8
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 9
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 10
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 11
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 12
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Expert
Set 13
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 14
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 15
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 16
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard, Expert
Set 17
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 18
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 19
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard
Set 20
6 puzzles · Medium, Expert
Set 21
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard
Set 22
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 23
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 24
6 puzzles · Medium, Hard
Set 25
6 puzzles · Medium
Set 26
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard
Set 27
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard
Set 28
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 29
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 30
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium, Hard
Set 31
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 32
6 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 33
5 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 34
5 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 35
5 puzzles · Easy
Set 36
5 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Set 37
5 puzzles · Easy, Medium
Every sheet prints on US Letter with half-inch margins, gives you a blank line under each cipher letter, and keeps the answer key on its own page so nothing is spoiled while you work.