About

One word ladder a day. No account, no download, no timer — about two minutes, usually with coffee.

Why this game

The word ladder is old and slightly absurd: Lewis Carroll invented it in the 1870s to turn APE into MAN. It has no graphics, no sound, and no progression system. It is also genuinely satisfying, because the solution is never hidden — it is sitting in the dictionary the whole time, waiting for you to see it.

Daily puzzles work better than endless ones. You get one board, you get a small number, and you get to compare it with a friend. That is the whole product.

How it is built

It is a static site: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no framework and no build step. The puzzles are generated ahead of time by a script that searches the word graph, so every par you see is the true shortest ladder rather than a guess. The word list is a curated set of common four-letter English words, which is why the occasional obscure word gets rejected.

There are no cookies, no accounts, and no analytics. Your streak lives in your browser.

Contact

Bugs, bad puzzles, missing words, or a ladder you think is unfair: hello@rungaday.com. If a puzzle is genuinely broken we will replace it.