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 four-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. COLD → CORD → CORE 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.

What par means

Par is the shortest climb the dictionary allows, with the day's leap in hand — the true shortest path through every word the game accepts, leap included, found by exhaustive search before the ladder ships. It cannot be beaten, so matching it means you found an optimal route, including the best place to spend the leap. Every ladder is par 5 or 6 now.

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, and against the leap in September 2026.

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 three of four letters differ, you need at least three steps, so par is telling you how much slack you have.
Change the vowel. Vowels are where four-letter words are richest — BAT-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.

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 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, and Reset keeps every climbed rung on the card. Words the game refuses still cost nothing. Full details on how scoring works.