I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get tired of staring at screens. I want to keep my brain engaged with something, but without my phone, my tablet, my laptop, even the television. I just want to unplug. And for those moments, I’ve found the perfect low-tech diversion. Best of Cryptograms: 450 Large-Print Puzzles to Flex Your Brain is filled with quotes from history and pop culture written in code.

If you don’t know what a cryptogram is, it’s a puzzle where the take a quotation and use a simple code to substitute each letter for another, and you have to figure out from the context which letter is which. Figuring out the code, going through the quotes and substituting your known letters until you can guess at new words, adding more letters that you’ve decoded, over and over until you’ve solved the whole puzzle, is not easy and gives me such a feeling of success when I get a puzzle figured out that I just can’t put this book down. And each quote is a new code, so every puzzle is a chance to start over from scratch and figure it all out.

The large-print puzzles means that there’s lots of room on the page to add your letters, and the quotes feature movies, sports, U.S. history, artists, authors, musicians, reporters, actors, science, world history, plays, and technology. The quotes inspire, entertain, and bring back fun memories, and knowing the topic you’re in (books, for example) can offer hints as to decode these head-scratcher puzzles.

If you’re new to cryptograms or felt like you never had much luck figuring them out, there are hints to help you out. There is an entire page explaining how to solve the puzzles and a chart that shows which letters and words appear the most in the English language. Looking for simple words like “the” or “I” can often give hints as to the code you need. And if you need still more help, there is a page in the back that gives you one letter for each puzzle to help you get started. There is no judgment or shame in using that. These puzzles are designed to take you some time, so if you want to jump start the process, it’s all good. There is only one rule here: have fun!

I first fell in love with cryptograms when I was a kid, and I’ll admit that I’ve let them fall to the side since I’ve become addicted to my shiny phone and all its games. But this book came into my life at a time when I needed to spend some serious time away from the screen, and it rekindled my love of word puzzles that I can do with a pencil. If you’re a cryptogram fan, this is definitely one to check out.

A copy of Best of Cryptograms was provided to me through Callisto Media, with many thanks.