Every letter hides inside a group of five A's and B's.
Turn this message into a real game: create a virtual lock your players must crack open.
The Bacon cipher replaces every letter with a string of 5 characters, using only A's and B's — for example, "AABAB" for the letter G. It's essentially binary code before its time, with A and B standing in for 0 and 1.
Invented by English philosopher Francis Bacon in the early 1600s, this system was designed for steganography — where the real secret isn't the message itself, but the fact that a message exists at all. You can hide an A or a B inside a font choice, a capital letter, or even an object.
For a treasure hunt, the "secret inside a secret" nature of the Bacon cipher is brutal in the best way: hide the A's and B's in two colors, two font sizes, or two types of objects placed around the room, and your players will have to spot the pattern before they can even start decoding.
Plain message
THE CLUE IS SECRET
Coded message
BAABB AABBB AABAA / AAABA ABABB BABAA AABAA / ABAAA BAABA / BAABA AABAA AAABA BAAAB AABAA BAABB
Split the text into groups of 5 characters, then match each group against the reference grid (26 possible combinations for 26 letters). A bit tedious by hand, but very logical once you have the grid in front of you.
Steganography means hiding the very existence of a message, unlike encryption, which only hides its content. The Bacon cipher lets you disguise A's and B's inside an ordinary-looking font, color, or layout choice, so no one even suspects a message is there.
Yes — on CrackAndReveal you create a lock whose expected answer is the word decoded from the A's and B's. Players crack the hidden pattern, type their answer online, and the lock opens automatically.
Because with only 2 symbols (A and B), you need at least 5 positions to generate enough combinations (32) to cover all 26 letters of the alphabet without overlap — the same basic principle still used in modern binary computing.
With CrackAndReveal, your coded message becomes a virtual lock to crack: players decipher your code, enter the solution and reveal your surprise.
Create a free lock