Word Ladder is a word puzzle where you transform one word into another by changing a single letter at a time. Every word you write along the way has to be a real word in the dictionary. The puzzle was invented by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, in 1877. He called it "Doublets" and published it in Vanity Fair magazine. It is one of the oldest word games still being played today.
On DailyBrain, there are five Word Ladder puzzles every day. The first two are Easy, the middle two are Normal, and the last one is Hard. The difficulty is based on how many steps the shortest solution requires. An Easy puzzle might take three or four moves. A Hard puzzle can take seven or eight. The game generates the puzzles from a fixed date seed, so everyone playing on the same day gets the same set.
Type a word in the input box and press Submit. The word must be the same length as the start word and differ from your last word by exactly one letter. The game tracks your chain and tells you when you are stuck or when you have solved it. You do not need to type the target word at the end. The game places it automatically when your second-to-last word is one letter away.
On Hard puzzles, think about what letters you need to change and work backwards from the target as well as forwards from the start. Common bridge words like CORE, BORE, BARE, CARE appear in a lot of ladder solutions because they connect to many other words. If you get stuck, the Hint button shows the next word on the shortest path without giving the whole solution away.
Yes. Your streak counts consecutive days where you solved at least one puzzle. If you miss a day, it goes back to zero. Your total wins and best step count stay saved regardless. All of this is stored in your browser using localStorage, so it stays on your device and does not go to any server. If you clear your browser data, the history clears too.
Not directly. The daily puzzles rotate at midnight and there is no archive for Word Ladder yet. The main archive shows past daily themes and puzzle sets for the other games. If you want a reference, the Word Ladder history post on the blog has a few worked examples to practise with.