Talk:Down on the Farm (Six of Spades)/@comment-107.216.26.150-20140914144525

These are cryptograms - basically, for any group, ALL of the letters are replaced with other letters, and the point of the puzzle is to figure out which letters stand in for which to reveal the message (or in this case, animals).

The difficulty in this puzzle is that there are five different groups - so, five different ways of replacing the letters, and you won't know until you try to solve which group (and which rules) each clue belongs to.

So, for example, for one animal, you might figure out that CRJENNW is actually GORILLA, and the C = G, R = O, J = R, etc. (This is not one of the actual clues, and I forget if Gorilla is one of the animals or not). You can then look around at other animals, and several of them will follow these same rules (C = G, R = O, etc.), but many of them will follow other rules you will need to discover.

The way that I started on this puzzle was to look for words that had uncommon sequences of letters (like words that have lots of a single letter, or that have double letters) and think of animals that fit that pattern. Then, once I figured out that animal, I start going through each other clue and seeing if replacing the letters I just discovered made a possible animal on that clue or just made gibberish.