Rungs 0
Par –
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Solved!
Word ladders were invented by Lewis Carroll in 1877, and the rule has not changed since: get from the start word to the target word by changing a single letter at a time, and every rung of the ladder has to be a real four-letter word. COLD to WARM is the famous one — cold, cord, card, ward, warm. Type each new word and press Climb or hit enter. The letter you changed is highlighted so you can see the path you took, and Step back undoes a rung if you climb into a dead end.
Par is the length of the shortest ladder that exists between the two words, so matching it is a genuinely good result and your score is the number of rungs you used. The useful trick is to work from both ends: look at the target and ask which words are one letter away from it, then aim for those rather than wandering forward hopefully. Vowels are the flexible part of a four-letter word — swapping the vowel usually keeps you in real-word territory, while changing two consonants in a row rarely does. If you are stuck, change the letter you have not touched yet; ladders that feel impossible are usually ones where you have fixed the wrong letter early and are now trying to fix everything else around it.