How to play
Everything the game will not stop to explain.
Build seven words. Each one is a letter longer than the one below it, starting at three letters and finishing at nine. Every word has to follow the same rule, and the rule changes every day.
You get three minutes for the whole climb.
The climb
The tower grows out of the ground as you go. Solve a rung and it rises, with the next one waiting underneath. You are always working on the shortest unsolved word.
4 SAND
5 STONE
6 STREET
7 STATION
8 STANDARD
9 SPACESHIP
That climb follows the rule every word starts with S. Note that the words have nothing to do with each other beyond the rule and the length. You are not transforming one word into the next, which is what makes this different from a classic word ladder. There is more on that distinction on the word ladders page.
The four kinds of rule
The rule is the only thing every word has in common. There are four kinds, and which one you get depends on the day.
| Kind | Example | Would accept |
|---|---|---|
| Starts with | Every word starts with S | SUN, SAND, STONE |
| Ends with | Every word ends with R | EAR, DOOR, FLOOR |
| Contains | Every word contains EA | SEA, BEAD, BREAD |
| Starts with, avoiding | Every word starts with G and avoids E | GAS, GOAT, GRAND |
The letter or pair changes daily too, so "starts with S" and "starts with SU" are different puzzles. You find out the exact rule when you press Ready, not before.
The added-S rule
You cannot reach a longer rung by adding an S to a shorter word. This holds on every puzzle, every day.
Not accepted: CATS, MAKES, STORIES.
Accepted: ABACUS, ACCESS, CHAOS.
The difference is whether removing the final S leaves a real word. Without this rule every rung would have a trivial answer and the climb would not be worth making.
The skip
One per run. It costs twenty five seconds and the skipped rung does not score, so a skipped run finishes at six of seven rather than stalling. Spend it late rather than early, because the long words are where runs actually die.
Clean climbs and streaks
Finishing all seven rungs without using your skip is a clean climb. Your streak counts consecutive days on which you played the daily. Extra runs after the daily do not touch your streak either way, so there is no risk in playing more.
Sharing your result
There are two buttons and they do different things. Share builds a picture of your tower, which your phone hands straight to whatever you share with, and which a computer saves as a PNG. Copy puts a text version on your clipboard for pasting into a post.
Either way you are sharing the shape, not the words, so posting your result spoils nothing for anyone who has not played yet. It carries the date, how many rungs you got and your time, and never the day's rule or any of your answers.
On a phone
Tap the letters on the keyboard at the bottom of the screen. The game uses its own keyboard rather than your phone's, because phone autocorrect quietly rewrites words between typing and submitting and it was costing people rungs they had actually solved.
A note on the dictionary
A small number of words are deliberately left out to avoid causing offence. If you are certain a word is real and it will not go in, that may be why.