Two puzzles a day, built to be fair

The puzzles

LockCode is a deduction puzzle in the Mastermind family. A 4-digit code with no repeated digits, four opening clues, six guesses. Feedback is a pair of counts — right digit in the right place, right digit in the wrong place — which is deliberately less than Wordle tells you per guess: the pleasure is in the inference, not the vocabulary. Play it.

Ladder is an anagram puzzle with a curve. A 5-letter word hides inside a 7-letter word, which hides inside a 9-letter word; each rung adds exactly two letters. Solving the small word makes the bigger one tractable, so the difficulty climbs with you instead of starting hard. Play it.

How a day’s puzzle is made

Both puzzles are generated by code and checked by code before a human ever sees them — that is what lets one person run a daily site without missing a day.

• LockCode picks a code and searches for four clues that leave 8–12 possible codes — enough that the answer must be earned, never so many that guessing beats reasoning. Every clue set is verified against all 5,040 codes, and the secret code is guaranteed to be consistent with its own clues. The puzzle number and date seed the generator, so the same day always produces the same puzzle.
• Ladder chains come from a search over a list of familiar English words: triples where each word’s letters contain the previous word’s letters exactly. Words outside the 50,000 most common in English, plurals, and chains that are just a suffix added to the word below (trust → trusted) are rejected. The surviving chains are ordered by a fixed shuffle; nobody, including us, looks up tomorrow’s words.
• A health check plays each day’s puzzle against the live site and reports if anything is unsolvable.

Why no timer

An earlier version of the word game had a 30-second clock. It made people anxious rather than engaged, and because a page reload reset it, it was not really a rule at all. Ladder replaces time pressure with information pressure: every hint you take is visible in your shared result, and each rung has a generous but finite number of tries. Rules that are enforced — on the server, not in your browser — are the only kind worth having.

What we store

Your progress, streak and settings live in your browser. The server keeps an anonymous per-puzzle record (a random identifier your browser generated, the guesses you made, and whether you finished) so that attempts and hints can be enforced and so the “you beat 72%” comparison can be computed. We count daily visitors with a hashed, per-day token that cannot be linked across days. Details in the privacy policy.

Support the puzzle-maker

Perplexd is free and the puzzle pages carry no ads. The cheapest way to support it is the best one: paste your result somewhere a friend will see it. If you would like to cover the hosting, you can buy the puzzle-maker a coffee on Ko-fi.

Contact

Bugs, puzzle complaints (a word that isn’t a word, a chain that feels unfair), press: perplexdgame@gmail.com. Include the puzzle number.