This time a cute little code for you to speed through, named after our favourite shelled gastropod – the snail! In this instance, our snail code is a type of cipher called Atbash.
Don’t Be Shy
The Atbash cipher popped up in the Bible’s Old Testament (so it’s that old), and works by lining up the alphabet to its reverse. A=Z, B=Y and onwards, as we can see with our plaintext above and our cipher text below:
As you can see, there isn’t much to make this one secure. Until we start mucking around with it.
Getting Up To Speed
Let’s get our familiar looking 5-by-5 grid and fill it with the alphabet. As so often happens, a letter needs to make way, and we say goodbye ‘J’. Not really goodbye, but we combine ‘J’ in with ‘I’ for this one.
Not very special yet, until we add a little colour to look more like a snail. Or, a red snail and a blue snail locked in eternal struggle.
These colours give us two equal paths, and if we briefly swap in some numbers, we can still see where each spot will match up to its opposite. A red 4 would be swapped to a blue 4, meaning that ‘W’ would become ‘D’, and so on. Lucky cell 13 in the centre doesn’t get swapped to anything, it remains as itself.
Protective Shell
Unfortunately, even putting our Atbashed alphabet into snail spirals doesn’t make it all that secure. That’s why we should always shift our alphabets with a keyword. In this case, our red vs blue snails will be shuffled along with one ‘Wyoming’.
Adding a keyword (of at least six letters, none of which are repeated) bumps the rest of the alphabet along, and goes a long way to making your text more secure.
Snail Mail
To business! Trying out this code for the word ‘flag’. ‘F’ is our central cell, so that stays the same. F=F. ‘L’ on the red left side is position 6, the equivalent of blue 6 and ‘C’. L=C. ‘A’ on red 10 swaps to blue 10 Q. A=Q. Finally ‘G’ in red 9 goes to blue 9 and R. G=R. So FLAG becomes FCQR. To decode it’s basically just the same process.
Let’s Go, Escargot!
Look out in your Escape Room for this distinctive set of spiral patterns, along with the vital keyword that will help unlock it. Sketching out the numbered positions that mirror to each other will also help. You could even flatten out the spirals into the long lines like our first image above.
Good luck escaping!
ZEX QGH ZH EHGH?
