Code Breaking Puzzles for Kids: 50 fun code puzzles for junior code crackers aged 8-12

Welcome to this brand new book containing no fewer than fifty code-cracking puzzles for you to try. Each puzzle has a difficulty level next to it so you can see how hard we think it will be to crack, although everyone is different and so don’t worry if sometimes you find a puzzle marked as easy to be difficult: you may find you think some of the hard puzzles are easy! One star next to a puzzle means it is relatively easy, two stars for medium, and three stars are reserved for what we think are the trickiest code cracking puzzles in the book.

Each puzzle is self-contained, so you don’t need to solve the earlier puzzles to try the later puzzles in the book, although you might like to work through in order as some of the easier puzzles are at the start and the first five puzzles have hints on how to try to crack the codes, so will act as good warm-up material for some of the more challenging codes to crack later on.

If you can solve the majority of the code puzzles in this book successfully and reveal all their hidden messages, then you are well on your way to being a code-breaker extraordinaire! If you get stuck at any point, then remember that some of these puzzles are deliberately hard so they will be challenging to solve. It’s always worth taking a break and coming back to a difficult puzzle later.

There are a wide range of different styles of puzzles to solve in this code puzzle book for children: there are numerical codes, letter codes, symbolic codes, codes hidden in pictures, in word search grids, in crosswords, seemingly random text, lists, dots and dashes, famous codes from history, and much much more as every puzzle is different!

If you get stuck at any point, talking to friends and family about a puzzle and solving it in a group can be great fun. The suggested age range for the book is 8-12, although the easy puzzles (marked with one-star) should be accessible to a younger age range, perhaps 6+, whilst the hard puzzles may prove challenging to teenagers. Therefore the age range 8-12 is just a suggestion, as individual abilities vary so much.

Here is an example of a two-star (middle level difficulty puzzle) in this code breaking book for kids: this is not one of the actual puzzles from the book but uses the exact same logic as the puzzle in the book so you can get some idea of difficulty. Can you read what it says?

FI OY EU JN YO OS VL NI TG IH CS DO TE EH WN TE IH KN OY WU LI EL JN YO HT SI OB KO

We hope you enjoy the puzzles in this book and find solving the codes and revealing their secrets satisfying and fun. All the solutions are included at the back of the book, but also a clear explanation of how the answer is achieved. There is nothing more frustrating than seeing an answer but not understanding how it is reached, so we give details of the process needed to crack each and every code in the book.

Finally we want to say - HPPE MVDL DPEFCSFBLFS!