Symbol Substitution

The alphabetic substitution cipher replaces one letter for another letter. But who says that the encrypted message has to use the same letters or numbers as the plain text message? You can use completely different symbols for the encoded message: hieroglyphics, Braille, emojis, constellations, or anything else you can think of.

A symbol substitution works the as alphatbetic subtitution, just with symbols. Here is a simple cipher example using symbols based on zodiac signs.

A message is a sequence of these symbols. It may contain punctuation (as long as it will not be mistaken for symbols).

And the decoding happens by finding each symbol in the table and replacing it with the associated letter.

One of the nice things about using a symbol substitution cipher is that the symbols can be unique and be used across multiple puzzles. Rather than give the table directly, a seprate puzzle, like symbol algebra. And rather than give a message of symbols outright, the symbols and order can be extracted from another puzzle, like the grid lookup.