Word Ladder▶Play

Change one letter at a time to walk from the start word to the goal. Every rung must be a real word — and the game only ever offers real ones.

How to play

You are given two five-letter English words. Turn the first into the second by changing one letter at a time, and every word you pass through has to be a real word too.

Tap any letter of your current word and the game shows every letter that can go in that position, each with the word it would make. Tap one and you step onto that rung. Because the choices are generated from a dictionary, you never have to wonder whether a spelling counts — if it is not offered, it is not a word.

Undo takes back your last step. Stepping backwards costs a move exactly as stepping forwards does, so there is no penalty for exploring beyond the time it takes.

Par is shown from the start: it is the length of the shortest ladder that exists between the two words, worked out by the game before it hands the puzzle to you. Every puzzle you are given has a solution of between four and seven steps. You are scored on the clock rather than the step count, so a slightly longer route found quickly beats a perfect one found slowly.

Tips & strategy

Work from both ends at once. Look at the goal word and ask which letters it would accept as its own last step, then try to steer toward those shapes rather than toward the goal itself. Meeting in the middle is far easier than pushing all the way from the start, because the number of words reachable in one step grows quickly in both directions.

Vowels are the joints of the ladder. Most five-letter words that connect to many others differ from their neighbours in a vowel slot, so a word with an awkward consonant cluster is usually a dead end waiting to happen. If the option list for a word is short, you are probably already in a narrow corner and should back out rather than push deeper.

Count matching letters, but do not trust the count. It is tempting to fix the letters that already match the goal and only change the rest, yet many ladders require breaking a matching letter for a step or two to get around a gap in the dictionary. When you are stuck with three letters right and nothing available, the answer is almost always to change one of the three.

The step count is not scored, so use undo freely. Backing up two steps to try another branch costs a couple of seconds; grinding at a dead end costs far more. Par is there to tell you how much slack the puzzle has, not to be matched — a route two steps over par found in half the time is the better run.