Word Ladder
Get from the start word to the goal by changing one letter at a time. Every rung has to be a real word, and par is the fewest steps it can be done in.
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How par works
Par is measured, not guessed: every ladder is picked by searching the whole graph of common words of that length for the shortest route between the two ends. Today’s puzzle is somewhere between four and six steps.
Each ladder has more than one shortest route, so finding a different way down in the same number of steps is a win rather than a wrong answer. Rungs are checked against the full dictionary, which is looser than the list the puzzle was built from — if you know an unusual word that works, it counts.
A worked example
SHARP to FROCK looks impossible at first: the two words have no letters in common in any position. Par is 6, and this is one route.
SHARP → SHARK → SHACK → SHOCK → CHOCK → CROCK → FROCK
Read it back and each step changes exactly one letter, and every rung is a word you already knew. The trick is that you are not steering towards FROCK letter by letter — the first two moves go nowhere near it. You are changing the vowel and the ending first, then walking the front of the word across.
This ladder has two shortest routes. If you found the other one in six steps, you matched par exactly as well as this did.
Where your streak lives
On your device, and nowhere else. There is no account and nothing is sent anywhere, so a new phone starts from zero unless you carry your history over with the code on the games page.