A daily word chain puzzle

Link Ladder is a word chain puzzle with a new chain every day. Ten words are linked in a line, and each neighbouring pair makes a compound word or a familiar phrase. Your job is to find every word in the chain.

Play today’s chain

How a word chain works

In a word chain, each word connects to the next. In Link Ladder the connection is always the same kind: put two neighbouring words together and you get a real compound word or phrase.

Here SNOW links to BALL (snowball), BALL links to ROOM (ballroom), ROOM links to SERVICE (room service) and SERVICE links to STATION (service station). A full Link Ladder chain has ten words and nine links.

What you see, and how to solve it

• The first word is shown in full.
• Every other word shows its first letter and the right number of boxes.
• You solve the chain from top to bottom, one word at a time.
• After a wrong guess, letters turn green (right place), orange (in the word, wrong place) or grey (not in the word).
• You have three chances at each word. After three misses the word is revealed, so you always reach the end of the chain.

Stars and scoring

Your stars depend on how many wrong guesses you make across the whole chain: none earns five stars, one earns four, two to five earn three, six to ten earn two, and eleven or more earn one. Lifelines don’t cost stars. You can add your name to the daily leaderboard and, if you sign in, keep your streak and stars on any device.

Share your chain without spoilers

When you finish, you can share a grid of coloured squares that shows how you did on each word without giving any answers away, and challenge a friend to beat your score.

Looking for yesterday’s chain?

Every finished chain is published in the answers archive the day after, so today’s puzzle is never spoiled.

More: How to play · Compound word game · Word chain puzzle · Games like Wordle · Past answers