How to play Rung

Climb from one word to another, changing a single letter at a time, with every step a real word.

The rules

You are given a five-letter word at the bottom and a goal word at the top. The climb goes upward to meet it.
Change exactly one letter per step. BLIND → BLEND → BLEED and so on.
Every step has to be a real word. If what you make is not one, the game says so and nothing is spent — a wrong guess costs you nothing but a moment.
Tap a letter in your current word, then tap the letter you want in its place. A real keyboard works too.
Undo steps back through your climb. You get three, and each one counts as a rung on your scorecard — a rescue, not a free rewind.
The leap, once a day: tap Leap and change two letters in one move. Only the word you land on has to be real — the one in between never existed, and it draws as a gap in your ladder. A leap costs two rungs, and undoing it gives it back.
Reset puts you back on the starting word if you are boxed in. The rungs you climbed stay on your scorecard, but every word is yours to use again.
Hint is for when you are stuck: it names the next word of a shortest climb from the word you are on, puts the caret on the letter that changes and lights its key. You still type it. Each hint costs two rungs, so the button asks “Sure?” and takes a second tap; asking again from the same word is the same answer for free. If there is no way up from where you are without going back, it says so and costs nothing.
Finished? The results sheet can show you the shortest climb there was — on a tap, only if you want it, so a day you would rather puzzle over stays unspoiled.

What par means

Par is one rung more than the shortest climb the dictionary allows, one letter at a time — the true shortest path through every word the game accepts, found by exhaustive search before the ladder ships, plus one to spare. So matching par means you were one step off the optimal route, and finding that route brings you in under par. Every ladder is par 6 or 7, and every one can be climbed under par on ordinary words: the game accepts a wide dictionary, but no day depends on you knowing an obscure word.

The leap is not counted in par. Spent where the dictionary has no short way through, it can bring you in under par — and under par scores 100, the same as par. Spent carelessly, it is two rungs like any other two.

It was not always measured this way: par used to be computed against a smaller list of ordinary words, which quietly left it beatable on most days. Recomputed against the full dictionary in August 2026. Until 23 September 2026, and for one day on the 30th, Rung was four letters, most of those days with par counting the leap and no rung to spare; they are in the archive as they were played.

The empty rungs drawn above your climb show how many steps par expects you to have left. They are a guide, not a limit: you can take as many as you need.

Finding a route

Work out which letters have to change. Compare your word to the goal. If four of five letters differ, you need at least four steps, so par is telling you how much slack you have.
Change the vowel. Vowels are where five-letter words are richest — BL_ND-like patterns give you far more options than consonant clusters do. When you are stuck, the vowel is usually the way out.
Climb from both ends. Think about what could come immediately before the goal word as well as what comes after your start. Meeting in the middle is often much easier than pushing all the way from one end.
Do not aim for the goal's letters too early. Locking in the right letters straight away can strand you on a word with nowhere to go. Sometimes you have to move away from the target to get round a gap.
Plurals and past tenses are rungs too. BEATS, FIRED: a final S or D is often the easiest letter to change, and a word that ends in one is a word with more neighbors.

You cannot lose

Rung has no failure state. The climb ends when you reach the goal, however long it takes, and there is always a way through. The only question is how directly you got there.

Scoring

Par or better is 100, then nine points a rung beyond it, with a floor of 30. An undo counts as a rung — the climb you take back stays on the scorecard, like a stroke in golf. The leap counts as two rungs, a hint counts as two, and Reset keeps every climbed rung on the card. Words the game refuses still cost nothing. Full details on how scoring works.

Past puzzles

Every Rung so far is in the Rung archive, each with its solution worked through — and a day you missed can still be played, for a score that sticks.