Word Steps

Solving a word ladder efficiently

One letter at a time, every rung a real word

Each level gives you a start word and a goal word of the same length. A legal step changes exactly one letter and leaves a word that exists — no anagrams, no insertions, no deletions. "Break the Ice" walks cold to warm; "Alchemy" walks lead to gold.

You build the ladder from a supplied bank of words. The bank contains every word in the shortest solution plus a number of plausible decoys that lead into dead ends, so the difficulty is choosing among valid-looking options rather than recalling vocabulary.

Seven levels ship with the game. Undo is unlimited and free — backing out of a branch costs you nothing in the scoring, so there is no reason to commit to a path you are unsure about.

Work from both ends and count letters

The most reliable technique is to solve from both directions at once. Look at the goal word and ask which words are one letter away from it, then look at the start and do the same. The two frontiers usually meet within a step or two, and meeting in the middle is far faster than searching blindly forward from the start.

The second technique is to count how many letters differ between your current word and the goal. That number is a lower bound on the moves remaining — you cannot fix two letters in one step. If a candidate step does not reduce that count, it needs to justify itself as a detour that unlocks a letter you could not otherwise change.

Detours genuinely are sometimes necessary. The cold-to-warm ladder passes through card, which shares no more letters with warm than cord did, because it is the only route that lets the fourth letter change legally. Recognising a required detour rather than dismissing it is the main skill the decoys test.

Measured against the shortest known path

Each level starts from a base of 1,000 plus 100 for every step in its optimal solution, so longer ladders are worth more. From that total, each move beyond the optimal count costs 75 points and each hint costs 125. The result is floored at 250, so a level always scores something.

The asymmetry is worth noting: a hint costs more than an extra move. Taking one hint is worse than wandering one step off the path and correcting yourself, which means exploring with the free undo is usually the better play when you are stuck.

Common mistakes

The decoy words in each bank are chosen to punish exactly these habits.

• Only searching forward from the start. Working backward from the goal halves the search space and is the single biggest improvement most players can make.
• Refusing to take a step that does not look closer to the goal. Some ladders require a detour through a word that shares no extra letters, and rejecting it on principle makes the puzzle unsolvable.
• Taking a hint before using undo. Undo is free and a hint costs 125 points — more than an extra move — so exploration should always come first.
• Chasing the first plausible word in the bank. The banks contain deliberate dead ends that look one letter away but lead nowhere.

What is different about this version

Every level has a hand-authored solution committed alongside it, so the scoring compares you against a genuinely optimal path rather than against a solver’s best guess. That is what makes the extra-move penalty meaningful: the game knows exactly how many steps the ladder needs.

Because you build from a curated bank rather than typing free text, no move can produce a non-word and no dictionary lookup is required. The puzzle stays entirely about pathfinding, and it works identically offline, on a phone keyboard, and with assistive technology.

Written by the Silverweb Games team from this game’s own implementation. Last reviewed July 31, 2026.