Word Ladder

Type the next word in the sequence, changing exactly one letter from the previous word. The game validates against an English word list. Reach the target word to clear the puzzle. Hint button reveals the next optimal step.

Word Ladder is a word-transformation puzzle where you change one letter at a time to morph a starting word into a target word, with each intermediate step being a valid dictionary word. The format dates to Lewis Carroll (1879) under the name 'doublets'.

What works is the dictionary validation. Each step is checked against a comprehensive English word list, so you cannot cheat by using nonsense words. The validation happens instantly as you type, which lets you experiment without commitment penalties.

One hundred puzzles arranged by word length (three, four, five, and six letters). The 3-letter puzzles are warm-up. The 4-letter puzzles are the sweet spot, where there are enough valid intermediate words to make the puzzle solvable but few enough to require thought, and the 5- and 6-letter puzzles are challenging, sometimes arbitrarily so because dictionary coverage gets uneven at longer lengths.

Tested across maybe six Mumbai commute sessions. Touch input with on-screen keyboard works fine. Desktop keyboard is faster. The format depends on word recall as much as puzzle solving, so input speed matters less than vocabulary depth.

Where the design gets in its own way is the hint system. Hints reveal the next word in an optimal solution path, which is too much help for a puzzle of this format. A gentler hint (revealing one letter of the next word, perhaps) would have been better calibrated to the format's challenge.

Where I would push back is the absence of a daily puzzle. Word puzzles work well as daily challenges (see Wordle for the canonical example) and the daily-puzzle pattern would suit Word Ladder.

Three-and-a-half stars. Solid word-ladder implementation with strong dictionary validation. Hint-mode and missing daily-puzzle hold it back from four.