Step Stones

What is a word ladder?

A word ladder is a classic puzzle: you're given two words of the same length and you have to get from one to the other by changing a single letter at a time. Every step along the way has to be a real word. COLD to WARM is the famous one: COLD, CORD, WORD, WARD, WARM. Lewis Carroll was setting these for readers back in the 1870s and called them Doublets.

Step Stones is our take on it. Each word you make is a stepping stone across a lily pond, and your frog hops forward with every good change. It's free and plays in your browser on a phone, tablet or computer.

How to play

1. Look at the start word at the bottom of the pond and the goal word on the lily pad at the top.
2. Tap the letter tile you want to change. It highlights.
3. Tap the new letter on the keyboard. If the result is a real word you haven't already used, your frog hops onto a new stone.
4. Keep going until the word on your stone matches the goal.

A few handy details: tiles that already match the goal word get a little green dot under them, and keys for letters in the goal word are green on the keyboard. If only one tile could make a real word with the letter you pick, you can skip step two and just tap the letter. You can't hop back onto a word you've already used in this ladder.

Controls

• Phone or tablet: tap a tile, then a letter. The Back button hops you back one stone, and the hint button shows which tile to change next.
• Computer: use the Left and Right arrow keys or the number keys (1 to 5) to pick a tile, then type a letter. Backspace hops back a stone and Esc pauses.
• The pause menu has Start over, which sends the frog all the way back to the start word.

Par and stars

Every ladder has a par: the fewest hops it can possibly be done in using our word list. Your stars depend on how close you get.

When you finish over par, the results screen shows one of the shortest paths next to yours, so you can see the shortcut you missed.

Modes

Daily Ladder

A new four letter ladder every day at midnight UTC, the same for everyone. The daily is always par 5. It's timed, and your score works like this: start at 100, lose 15 for each hop over par (it never drops below 10 from hops alone), lose 10 for each hint, and add a speed bonus of 1 point for every 3 seconds you finish under a minute and a half. A perfect par solve in 30 seconds scores 120. Hints are unlimited in the daily, they just cost points. The clock stops if you switch tabs.

Levels

There are 78 hand-picked ponds that unlock one after another. Levels 1 to 18 use three letter words, 19 to 50 use four letters, and 51 to 78 use five. That's 234 stars to collect in all. You can replay any level you've reached to improve your stars.

Hints, frogs and leaderboards

In Levels you start with 3 hints and can hold up to 9. You earn another hint the first time you get 3 stars on a level. A hint highlights the tile to change for the fastest route from where you're standing, which isn't always the move you'd expect.

Stars also bring new frogs to your pond. You begin with Sprout, then meet Leafy at 8 stars, Peaches at 20, Skipper at 40, Goldie at 70, Midnight at 110, Berry at 150 and Old Jade at 200. Signed-in players can see their Daily Ladder score and total stars on the leaderboards.

How to solve a word ladder

• Count the differences first. Compare start and goal letter by letter. If three letters differ and par is 5, you know at least two hops will be detours, changing a letter to something that isn't its final value.
• Lock in matching letters early, but not stubbornly. Tiles with a green dot are already right. Most ladders let you keep them, but sometimes you have to break a correct letter to get around a dead end, then fix it later.
• Vowels are the usual bottleneck. Consonant swaps are easy (CORD to WORD). Changing a vowel often needs a specific word to exist. If the goal's vowel is different, work out early which word lets you make that switch.
• Work backward. Look at the goal and ask which real words are one letter away from it. COLD to WARM is easier when you notice WARD and WARM are neighbors.
• Common patterns make good bridges. Words that share an ending with lots of relatives (-ARE, -ORE, -ATE, -ING, -ANT) give you more places to hop.
• Use Back freely. Backing up costs nothing in Levels. Only the hops on your final path count toward par.
• Save hints for the vowel switch. The hint always points along a shortest path, so it's most useful at the point where you can't see how to turn one vowel into another.

Want more daily word puzzles? Letter Lantern is our daily five letter guessing game and Cipher Cafe serves a daily cryptogram.

Questions