What is a “Letter Game”?

A letter game involves, at least, two players whom act as separate authors for letters to one another. These letters are written in character and often times involve creating the story and describing situations that have happened to the character as well as relating news to the other character.

A mainstay in this type of writing is that the characters remain separate so that letters are a viable and reasonable form of communication.

How do the ciphers and codes work?

In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption and decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts are distinct in cryptography. In classical cryptography, ciphers were distinguished from codes. Codes operated by substituting according to a large codebook which linked a random string of characters or numbers to a word or phrase. For example, “UQJHSE” could be the code for “Proceed to the following coordinates”. When using a cipher the original information is known as plaintext, and the encrypted form as ciphertext. The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message, but is not in a format readable by a human or computer without the proper mechanism to decrypt it; it should resemble random gibberish to those not intended to read it.