Word ladder leagues
A private leaderboard for you and the people you actually know. Everyone plays the same daily word ladder; the league shows who was fastest.
The public board is a race against several hundred strangers, some of whom are very quick indeed. A league is the other kind of competition: five colleagues, a family across three time zones, a group chat that has run out of things to argue about. Same puzzle, much better odds.
How it works
- Start a league and give it a name. You get a six-letter code and an invite link.
- Send the link to whoever should be in it. They join in one click, free, with no app to install.
- Everyone plays the daily ladder as normal, whenever they like. Nothing extra to do.
- The league board shows today's times in order, plus who has won the most days over the last week.
Good to know
- It's free, and there is no limit on league size or on how many leagues you are in.
- Private by default. A league is only visible to its members, and it never appears on the public site.
- Hard-mode leagues. Tick hard mode when you create one and only hard-mode solves count on its board: no undo, no hints, par or bust, strict five minutes. For the people who found the normal game too easy.
- Times are measured on our server, from the moment the words appear to the moment you finish, so nobody's league is decided by a fast laptop.
Why a word ladder makes a good office game
One puzzle a day, the same for everyone, and about five minutes to play it. Nobody has to be online at the same time as anybody else, nobody can play twice, and there is a natural stopping point, which is more than can be said for most things people do in a group chat.
It also has a skill curve that rewards turning up. Par is the shortest route through everyday words, so every puzzle is solvable with vocabulary you already have; getting faster is about spotting the route sooner, not about knowing rarer words. That keeps a league competitive between people with quite different reading habits.
Not sure what a word ladder is yet? Start here, try today's puzzle, or work through the guided tutorial first. When you're ready, join free and the league takes about thirty seconds to set up.