How Ladder works

Three scrambled words, stacked. The bottom rung is five letters. The middle rung is seven letters and contains every letter of the bottom word plus two new ones. The top rung is nine letters and contains every letter of the middle word plus two more. Solve the bottom word and the climb begins: the next rung is unlocked, and the two new letters are marked in gold so you know exactly what changed. A typical chain looks like SCARE → CAMERAS → AMERICANS.

There is no clock unless you want one. Every hint you take reveals one letter from the left and shows up as a yellow square in your shared result; a clean climb is three rows of green. Each rung allows twelve tries before you must take a hint or give up, which is plenty for thinking and not enough for brute force.

The Conundrum. Ladder grew out of the conundrum round in Countdown, and that round is still here for anyone who wants it: when the nine-letter rung unlocks, the letters stay hidden until you choose 30 s Conundrum or No clock. Start the clock, and the letters appear with thirty seconds on the timer — enforced on the server, so a refresh won’t buy more time. Beat it and your share carries a ⚡ and your seconds; the finish screen tells you how you compare with everyone else who took the clock that day. Miss it and the rung simply continues untimed, with hints available.

Solving anagrams faster

• Find the ending first. Nine-letter English words overwhelmingly end in a small set of suffixes: -ING, -TION, -MENT, -NESS, -ABLE, -IOUS, -ATED. If the tiles contain T, I, O, N, try pinning -TION and arranging the rest.
• Carry the rung up. The word you just solved is inside the next one. Do not rescramble it in your head: keep its letters as a block, look at the two gold tiles, and ask where two letters could be inserted. PRESENT plus I and D is PRESIDENT; you only had to place two letters.
• Pair consonants. Common digraphs — TH, CH, SH, PR, ST, TR, ND — reduce nine free tiles to five or six chunks.
• Place vowels by count. A 9-letter word with only two vowels usually has a consonant cluster at each end; four vowels usually means alternation. Count before you arrange.
• Type, don’t tap, when you are close. Keyboard entry is faster for the last rearrangement; tap tiles when you are still scanning.

Where the chains come from

Every chain is found by a program that searches a list of familiar English words for triples where each word’s letters contain the previous word’s letters exactly, then rejects the boring ones — a word that is simply the shorter word with -ED added is not a puzzle. Plurals, proper nouns and obscure vocabulary are filtered out against an English frequency list, and the day’s chain is chosen by a fixed shuffle so nobody can look up tomorrow’s words. The current pool holds several hundred chains; new ones are added in batches after a human look.

Sharing

Your result is three rows — one per rung — of green (clean) and yellow (hinted) squares, red if you gave a rung up, with the count of wrong tries. It does not reveal the words. A 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 top row with no ✗ is the brag.

Yesterday’s chain is in the archive. For deeper technique, read the anagram solving guide.