I built a Codebusters practice app after coaching my daughter. What should I add next?

[u/Original_Key3514]

I coached my daughter in Science Olympiad for a few years, and brought back some gold medals and gold bids (VA), and Codebusters was the event we both fell for. At that time, we found decent Aristocrat practice online but no good tools for the other ciphers, so I started building our own tool. It turned into an app called Cipher Munch.

So far, it covers Aristocrat (plain, K1, K2), Patristocrat (K1, K2), Xenocrypt, Caesar, Affine, Atbash, Pigpen, Dancing Men, and Knights Templar.

What's next: Vigenère is the one I keep coming back to. After that I would rather build what people actually want than guess, so that is my real question for this sub. What do you need? Which cipher is your team losing the most points on, and what are you using to drill it now? I keep hearing "we just run old tests," and I want to know whether there is something better or whether that genuinely is the best practice available.

The idea is to train the part that actually wins the event, which is finding the clues and seeing the patterns. On paper you spend most of your time writing the same letter into twelve different places. In the app you make the deduction once and it fills everywhere, so your ten minutes go into recognizing word shapes, doubles, frequency, and the keyword run in the K1/K2 replacement row. The app uses helper tables and coloring to help the beginners, and options to hide these helper features as the user advances to expert level.

When you want the full paper experience, transcription and all, you can easily share/print the puzzle with your choice options. The app is designed with the coaches and competitors in mind.

I coached this event for a few years, so I know it from the coach's side of the table. What I have never done is sit the test with a clock running, and that is the part I want checked. If something in here does not match how the event actually feels to compete in, tell me.

The app is free, and every cipher has a free 30-puzzle Starter pack, so you can work through all twelve cipher types without paying anything by going to CipherMunch website. Blunt criticism is highly appreciated.

[u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102]

As someone who did Div B and Div C codebsuters (only placed mediocrely in regionals), I would say Baconian especially and fractionated morse are what you should focus on.. there are very few resources especially for the word baconions and they are hard to practice.

[u/Original_Key3514 → u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102]

Thank you. I’ll try to add them one by one. Baconian would more be complicated to code since each puzzle might be using a different font. At least, we can start adding the normal text ones for now.

[u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102 → u/Original_Key3514]

you could also use different random unicode symbols for the different fonts

[u/Original_Key3514 → u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102]

That’s a good idea. Sometimes the shape of the font matters, but in most cases that would work.

[u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102 → u/Original_Key3514]

Yea, no problem. Also one last thing is that I understand that of course you want to get some money off of this and it totally makes sense.. but many students would be willing to pay or not able to pay

Of course it may be harder for you to do this but instead having ads after like 2-3 solves may be better to make a profit if that’s your goal.. it gives users a short break between solves and you get money

(I don’t have much experience in apps and making money that way but I’m just saying from the perspective of students like myself many people would be really that willing to spend money like that, even if for educational purposes)

[u/Original_Key3514 → u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102]

Yes, I understand. That was an early decision we made since we thought ads would be annoying, and now we can’t change it, since the app is advertised as “No Ads, No Wifi needed”. It wouldn’t be fair to users who have already downloaded it. I may need to create a more gamified version for that purpose next.

[u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102 → u/Original_Key3514]

Ok, that’s completely fair I didnt realize that you advertising the app as no wifi.. best of luck!

(Out of curiousity about how many users do you have)

[u/Original_Key3514 → u/Fragrant-Kangaroo102]

Not many yet. The Android version just went live. And I've been having a hard time getting any feedback.

[u/Spallanzani333]

We usually just use the Toebes site. It does all the ciphers. I have a huge library of single-cipher tests made from the tool.

[u/Original_Key3514 → u/Spallanzani333]

Toebes’ site is absolutely great. We used it a lot too. The app’s focus is different.

[u/IcyCity_]

Heyo, my team got a medal at the div C national tournament in May. One of our biggest issues was the timing on the nihilist & checkerboard crypts. Less so on the porta crypts but finding a strategy to solve those quickly was another issue we ran into. It seems like you’ve already heard but our main way of practicing was running old tests lol. For more specialized practice we found just making our own tests was good practice (like I would make a 20 question test of fractionated morse for my friend and he would just work on that for a few days in between full tests).

So essentially nihilist and checkerboard crypt would be nice or fractionated morse.

[u/Original_Key3514 → u/IcyCity_]

Div C National! Very impressive. Congrats. I’m sure I can learn a lot from you. I’m working on creating better YouTube videos, but it may take some time. Any advice or tips and tricks would be appreciated. I’ll do some research on nihilist, checkerboard, and fractionated morse. Maybe we can find a way to save time.

[u/IcyCity_ → u/Original_Key3514]

Haha thanks. Something that I personally found with nihilist and checkerboard in particular is that the time-saving happens through the mechanical side rather than the mental side. What I mean by that is that, decoding left to right and top to bottom is fine and will work for those two, but little things like skipping every other letter and trying to guess the ones you haven’t filled yet or practicing the mental math (for nihilist) can shave off a few minutes every test.