Miss Prince Posted:

Is the key a word, or is it a number/numerical sequence? I don’t know a ton about cryptanalysis, but I don’t want to try brute force and it’s too short for frequency analysis.

The point of the puzzle is essentially to guess how it’s encrypted. If I used a standard encryption method, either you would need a supercluster to crack it, or you would need to take 2 minutes to Google the appropriate tool and use it.