Symbol Identifier
Work out which alphabet a row of strange little symbols belongs to, then read it off the chart.
What do your symbols look like?
Spell something out
Useful the other way round too: if your symbols are a known word, this is how you confirm which alphabet they came from.
Pigpen
Corners and dots, from the cell each letter sits in on a pair of grids. Much the commonest symbol cipher in caching. Variants exist that order the second grid differently, so if a decode comes out close but wrong, try reading S–Z the other way round.
Braille
Six dot positions per cell, two columns of three. Puzzles often present it as filled and empty circles, or as holes punched in a card.
Maritime signal flags
The International Code of Signals. Watch which colour is on the left-hand edge — several pairs differ only in that.
Tap code
A 5x5 grid tapped out as a row count then a column count, usually written as groups of dots. K is sent as C.
Runes (Elder Futhark)
Straight strokes, cut to be carved into wood. There are twenty-four, so some English letters have no rune and some runes cover a pair of sounds.
Ogham
Groups of one to five strokes cut across or beside a centre line. Read bottom to top on a standing stone, left to right when written in a line.
Greek
Often used for its letter names rather than its sounds, so check whether the puzzle wants ALPHA or A.
Hebrew
Written right to left, which is the trap: a decoded answer that reads as nonsense may simply be backwards. Final forms of five letters are not listed separately.
Zodiac & planets
Astrological signs and planetary symbols, normally standing for their position in the list rather than for a letter.
Working out which alphabet it is
Count the distinct symbols first. Twenty-six or so and it is a letter substitution; around twenty and you are probably looking at Ogham or one of the older runic sets, where several English letters share a symbol or have none. Ten and it is likely digits rather than letters.
Then look at how the symbols are built. Dots in a rectangle of six are Braille. Corners, boxes and chevrons, some with a dot, are pigpen. Straight strokes cut at angles, with no curves at all, are runes: the shapes were made to be carved along the grain of wood, which is why nothing in them is round. Strokes grouped in ones to fives along a centre line are Ogham. Colour means signal flags.
Pigpen has variants
The grids are standard but their order is not, and a handful of cache owners use a version that fills the second grid differently or drops the dots in favour of a second pair of shapes. If a decode comes out with the first half of the message readable and the rest as nonsense, that is the signature of a variant rather than of a mistake on your part.
Once you have the letters
Getting the alphabet right is only half of it. The letters underneath are often enciphered as well. Send what you read to Decode Anything, which will try the shifts and substitutions over it, and rank anything coordinate-shaped to the top.