So, Plan B: Construct a puzzle around a word ladder, BLACK to WHITE.
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She was going one way on the word ladder while I was going the other.
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And if you can descend his word ladder, you might just find them and help him recover.
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Solving the puzzle itself is the main point, but who doesn't like a word ladder thrown in for good measure?
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And the theme clues aren't much help: they just say things like "Second word in the word ladder," and so on.
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Ms. Guizzo and Mr. Agard offer us a word ladder (denoted by circled squares), which we are to descend from the top of the grid.
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Word ladder-themed puzzles have been done before, but this puzzle makes things a little different by adding a third president between the top and bottom ones.
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It's a word ladder, where solvers start with one word (in this case, ROLL, at 1A) and change one letter at a time until they have a new word.
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That's what we have today in David Poole's crossword, and he offers us a chance to beat him at not one, not two, but three games: OTHELLO, REVERSI and a word ladder.
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A few months after this puzzle was accepted, David Kahn had a New York Times puzzle published involving a similar theme: a word ladder consisting of nine five-letter words with a thematic element at the halfway point.
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For example, at 17A, the clue is "... SLID SAID SAND SANE SINE NINE ..." I have climbed a lot of word ladders in my time, so I recognized that it was, indeed, a word ladder, but what to do with it?
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The capitalized series of words in each theme clue is actually a word ladder, and we are being asked to supply the first and last rung in order to get the answer, which is a common phrase in the form of ___ TO ___.
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Curiously though, the current puzzle idea came about when I wasn't actively seeking candidates for a word ladder; the concept 1A + 44A + 78A was mentioned on the news one day, and the daydreaming half of my brain immediately noticed how easily 1A could transform to 44A.
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We have OTHELLO at 23A and REVERSI at 50A, but it's the word ladder hinted at in 23A that makes the theme: You can almost feel the disk flipping from one color to the other as the ladder proceeds symmetrically down the grid in a backward S pattern.
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Wordplay TUESDAY PUZZLE — Robert Cirillo's word ladder in today's crossword puzzle is just like any other kind of ladder you might find at a hardware store, as long as you don't mind that several of the rungs between the top and the bottom are missing and that there's a ZIPLINE in the middle.
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Word ladder (also known as Doublets, word-links, change-the-word puzzles, paragrams, laddergrams, or word golf) is a word game invented by Lewis Carroll. A word ladder puzzle begins with two words, and to solve the puzzle one must find a chain of other words to link the two, in which two adjacent words (that is, words in successive steps) differ by one letter.
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Donald Knuth used a computer to study word ladders of five-letter words. He believed that three-letter word ladders were too easy (although Lewis Carroll found six steps were required for APE to evolve into MAN), and that six-letter word ladders were less interesting, since relatively few pairs of six-letter words could be connected with a word ladder. Knuth used a fixed collection of 5,757 of the most common English five-letter words, excluding proper nouns. He determined exactly when two words of the collection had a word ladder between them via other words in the collection.
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Knuth found that most words were connected to each other, and he also found that 671 words of the collection did not form a word ladder with any other words. He called these words "aloof", because "aloof" is itself an example of such a word.
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Often word ladder puzzles are created where the end word has some kind of relationship with the start word (synonymous, antonymous, semantic...). This was also the way the game was originally devised by Lewis Carroll when it first appeared in Vanity Fair. Some variations also allow the player to add or remove letters, and to rearrange the same letters into a different order (an anagram).
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The player is given a start word and an end word. In order to win the game, the player must change the start word into the end word progressively, creating an existing word at each step. Each step consists of a single letter substitution. For example, the following are the seven shortest solutions to the word ladder puzzle between words "cold" and "warm", using words from Collins Scrabble Words.
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The high scorer after the Word Ladder round had a chance to win a cash jackpot by finding the correct seven- digit combination to a safe that held a cheque. They had 90 seconds to solve one puzzle of each of the six types used in the main game, and could play them in any order. Passing was allowed, but the puzzle did not change if the contestant returned to it later. Each correct answer was worth £50.
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Lewis Carroll says that he invented the game on Christmas day in 1877. Carroll devised the word game for Julia and Ethel Arnold. The first mention of the game in Carroll's diary was on March 12, 1878, which he originally called "Word-links", and described as a two-player game. Carroll published a series of word ladder puzzles and solutions, which he then called "Doublets", in the magazine Vanity Fair, beginning with the March 29, 1879 issue.
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Foreword by Alan Tannenbaum, Éire: Cathair na Mart. He also devised a number of games, including an early version of what today is known as Scrabble. He appears to have invented – or at least certainly popularized – the "doublet" (see word ladder), a form of brain- teaser that is still popular today, changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word. For instance, CAT is transformed into DOG by the following steps: CAT, COT, DOT, DOG.
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The Word Ladder puzzle required the contestant to make only one change to the given word. The combination used each of the digits 1 through 7 once. Every solved puzzle filled in the digit that corresponded to it (1 through 6, in the order that the rounds were played in the main game). If the contestant solved all six puzzles, the 7 was placed in the only still-empty slot and they won the jackpot automatically in addition to the £300 for the puzzles.
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