Cryptune spans seven decades of popular music. Every song and album in the game carries a year, and sorting them produces something more interesting than a filing system: a record of how the way we title music has changed.
The clearest finding is that titles have been getting shorter, steadily, for sixty years. Because every Cryptune puzzle has one tile per word, the average number of tiles in a puzzle is a direct measurement of the average title length of its decade, and that number has fallen in almost every decade since the 1960s. Sentences became phrases, phrases became pairs, and pairs became single words.
Nobody planned that. It is a side effect of a puzzle game needing to break titles into pieces, and it turns out that counting the pieces measures something real.
Each decade page below has the story of the era, statistics drawn from the puzzles themselves, strategy for solving that decade's clues, and the full list of answers from those years.
One tile per word, so the average tile count is the average number of words in a title. Here is the whole game, in order:
That is 515 dated puzzles in total. The direction of travel is hard to miss.
A note on how the decades are assigned. Songs and albums are placed by their release year. Artists are not dated at all, since an act's career rarely sits inside one decade, so they live on the artist index instead.
These pages are generated directly from the puzzle data every time the site is built, so they never fall out of step with the game.
Artists do not appear on these pages because they carry no release year. They live on the artist index instead.