Homeword

A daily word ladder with a return leg.

You start on a word. Change one letter at a time, making a real word at every step, until you reach the goal — then keep going until you get all the way back to where you started.

The catch: no word may be used twice. The way home can never retrace the way out, so finding the goal is only half of it. The starting word is the only permitted repeat, because it is what closes the loop.

Every puzzle has a par — the fewest moves any legal loop can take, worked out by actually solving it rather than guessed at. Your score is how many moves over par you finished in. Zero is a perfect loop.

Two games, side by side: a four-letter board and a five-letter one. Each gets its own puzzle every day, its own goal, and keeps its own record, so a four-letter par and a five-letter one are never averaged into a number that describes neither. Switch between them whenever you like.

Free play gives you as many extra loops as you want, drawn from the same pool and kept out of your streaks.

Every puzzle in the game is solvable. A start word only enters the pool once a legal loop has been found for it and re-checked against the rules.

Every puzzle uses clean, everyday words.

No account. No sign-up. No server. Your progress and statistics are stored on your phone and never leave it — and the app contains no analytics or tracking of any kind. It works with no connection at all.