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This year you will be joining Captain George Scovell and the Duke of Wellington in their campaign to drive Napoleon's armies from the Peninsula. Each challenge will come in two parts, a message from the British army communications concerning the plans to undermine the French, and another intercepted by the British or their daring allies, the Spanish Guerilla forces. The British message (the part A challenge) should be straightforward to decrypt, at least in the early stages, but the French are farm more devious in these matters, and you may find their messages (the part B challenges) to be more tricky. There is glory to be won for either part, but the big prizes are reserved for those who crack the French messages most effectively and most quickly. You can read more about the rules of the competition and the way we score it on the Rules page. Good luck!

So, is anyone still trying? There is a big hint posted in one of the comments here on the site to help you with both 8A and 8B, but if you can't find it and want to know how to crack it before the end read on ...... 8A is a standard substitution cipher, but the text has been laid out in a square and then the square has been transposed (rows and columns interchanged). Excel is a really good tool to transpose it back. Just paste a tab between each letter and a return at the end of each line, save the file and then import it as a csv file telling Excel to use the tabs as cell separators. Then do frequency analysis and look for cribs. 8B is a homophonic cipher with nulls. The high characters (200 and up) represent nulls, and the low characters represent letters. It is not a very sophisticated cipher as 84 represents the same character as 184 and so on, so if you make that leap then frequency analysis and cribs will get you a long way. Also, as General Scovell tells you in 8A, you have seen this cipher (or part of it) used before! Good luck.

Still stuck on Challenge 5? Whether you are working on part A or B frequency analysis is your best friend. You might find things don't quite work the way you expect with part B, but that is because the cunning French have found a way to obscure things a bit, nonetheless if you forget that and plough on you might get enough of an edge to start breaking the cipher and from there guesswork will get you a long way. Part A is a bit trickier than before for a slightly different reason, as several have already found. Make sure you don't let Word do auto-correction on spellings for you if you use it to type up your solutions!