Ink Ladder

Ink Ladder is a daily word puzzle. You get two four-letter words — a start and a target — and your job is to climb from one to the other by changing exactly one letter at a time, where every intermediate step is itself a real word.

COLD → CORD → WORD → WARD → WARM

That is the whole game. It takes two minutes on a good day and considerably longer on a bad one.

How to play

1. Look at the start word at the top and the target at the bottom.
2. Type a four-letter word that differs from the start by one letter and press Enter.
3. Keep going. Each new rung must differ from the rung above it by exactly one letter.
4. Reach the target to finish. Your rung count is compared against par — the shortest chain that exists for today’s pair.

Undo takes back a rung, and no word can be reused within the same ladder.

Why it is harder than it looks

Word ladders punish forward-only thinking. The obvious first move — change the letter that most obviously needs changing — often walks you into a corner of the word graph with no exit. Strong solvers work from both ends at once, building two or three rungs down from the start and two or three up from the target, then joining them in the middle.

The other trick is knowing that not all letter positions are equal. In four-letter English words, the vowel slot has by far the most neighbours, so it is the position that keeps a ladder flexible. Locking your vowel in early is the most common way to strand yourself.

A new pair every day

The puzzle is generated from the date, which means everyone in the world gets the same ladder on the same day and a shared score is comparable. It resets at midnight UTC. Your streak counts consecutive days solved and lives entirely in your own browser.

Stuck? The answer and hints page reveals as little or as much as you want.

Tips

• Work from both ends. Look at the target word and ask which letters must change; often one of them can only change at a specific rung, which pins down the middle.
• Vowels are the cheap moves. Most four-letter words survive a vowel swap, so when you are stuck, try changing the vowel rather than a consonant.
• A rung that fixes two letters of the target at once is usually wrong. The shortest path tends to fix one letter per step and leave the rest alone.
• If nothing works from your current word, undo. Ladders have dead ends, and the cheapest fix is almost always one rung back rather than five rungs forward.