How to play Crossclimb
Crossclimb is a word ladder with clues. Seven rungs, every one a four letter word, and each rung differs from the one next to it by exactly one letter in one position. No anagrams, and nothing added or dropped. You climb it in three stages:
- Solve the five middle clues, in any order you like. Each clue points at one word.
- Order those five by dragging each row by its = handle, until every neighbouring pair is one letter apart. On a keyboard, focus a handle and use the up and down arrow keys.
- The top and bottom rungs unlock, with a single clue covering both. Fill them in and the climb is done.
A ladder reads the same from either end, so it does not matter which way up you build it. What is checked is the chain itself.
Tips for beginners
- Solve first, order later. The ordering only makes sense once you can see all five words, and the handles light up when it is time.
- Look at the letter that changes. Words in a ladder usually change in the same position for a stretch, so group the ones sharing three letters and see which run they form.
- The odd word out is an end. If four of your five chain neatly and one will not fit anywhere in the middle, it belongs at the top or the bottom of those five.
- Read the strike lines. Once all five rows are full, a wrong word gets a line through it until you change a letter, and a right one shines as you fix it.
Where Crossclimb comes from
Crossclimb is a word ladder with crossword clues, and the word ladder was invented by the author of Alice in Wonderland.
- 1877 Doublets On Christmas Day, Lewis Carroll invents a word game for two young friends, Julia and Ethel Arnold.
- 1879 In print Carroll publishes his Doublets in Vanity Fair from March 1879, and as a book later the same year.
- Today Crossclimb The ladder with a twist: each rung has a clue, and you must find the order that makes the chain work.
- Also known as
- Doublets, word ladder, word golf
- Puzzle family
- Word chain
- Our board
- Seven rungs of four letters
- What it trains
- Vocabulary and flexible spelling
Did you know? Carroll's own example turns HEAD into TAIL in five steps: head, heal, teal, tell, tall, tail.
Is this the same as LinkedIn's puzzle?
No. This is our own Crossclimb, in the same clues and ladder style. Every ladder is built and checked here, so the answers will not match any official daily answer. Our clues are definitions rather than trivia, which means each one can be checked against a dictionary rather than taken on trust. It is free, needs no account, and your streak is saved in your own browser.