Card Ladder

Ten cards sit face up across five columns. You may lift the top card of any column and drop it on another whose top card is exactly one rank higher or lower — a 7 goes on a 6 or an 8, never on another 7. Keep going until all ten cards are in a single column. Every card you move buries the one beneath it, so the order you play in is the whole puzzle.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is focused.
2. Move the cursor with Left and Right. The column under the cursor is outlined, not just tinted.
3. Lift the top card with Enter. That column now reads ▲ lifted.
4. Look for the ticks. Every column that will accept the lifted card reads ✓ takes it. Press Up or Down to jump straight to one of them.
5. Place it with Enter on that column. Press Enter on the same column again, or Esc, to put the card back instead — putting it back costs nothing.
6. Watch the move counter. You have four more moves than the deal was built from, so there is room for a wrong turn or two but not for guessing.
7. Win when one column holds all ten cards. If you run out of moves, or every top card ends up two or more ranks from every other, the round is over.

How do you decide which card to move first in a card stacking puzzle?

Work backwards from the end rather than forwards from the start. The last card to move has to sit on top of everything else, so ask which column can plausibly become the finished pile, then check what is buried where. The move to avoid is the one that drops a card on top of a card you will need later: once a 4 is sitting under a 9, the only way to free it is to move the 9 somewhere, and there may be nowhere for a 9 to go. In practice that means preferring moves that uncover a useful rank over moves that merely tidy the layout, and treating an empty column as a card you have already spent rather than as free space — nothing can be placed on an empty column here.

Is every deal actually winnable?

Yes, and by construction rather than by luck. Each deal is generated by starting from the finished position — one column holding every card, each sitting on one a single rank away — and then running the rules backwards. A backwards move lifts a card off a column whose top two ranks differ by one and drops it elsewhere; undoing that move is exactly a legal forward move, so the reversed list of backwards moves is a complete winning line. The game keeps its length as the deal's par, and the move budget is that par plus four.

Do the suits mean anything?

No. Spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs are decoration and nothing in the rules reads them — a 7 of clubs behaves identically to a 7 of hearts. They are printed because a rank with a suit reads as a card rather than as a number in a box. If you find yourself looking for a suit rule, there isn't one, and the screen reader deliberately does not announce them.

What happens if no move is left?

The round ends and is scored as a loss, immediately and out loud. A layout where every top card is two or more ranks from every other cannot recover, and leaving you to discover that by trying forty-eight combinations would be worse than telling you. It is also the lesson the game is built around: a dead end here is never a bad deal, it is a move order that buried something too early.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. The cards are ranks on tiles: no currency, nothing to buy, no wager of any kind, and no gambling mechanic anywhere in the game. There is no score to buy your way up and no ad to watch.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — the deal generator, the rules, the copy. Nothing is fetched while you play, and no result leaves the device.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both. Arrows move the cursor, Up and Down jump to the next column that can take the lifted card, Enter lifts and places, Esc puts a card back. Every column announces its top rank and how many cards it holds, and the board says how many columns are still in play and how many moves remain. Lifted and legal are announced as words and drawn with a glyph, so nothing depends on telling one tint from another.

Five columns, ten cards, ranks A to K, and one rule: the two top ranks must differ by exactly one. Equal ranks do not stack, and an empty column cannot be a destination — both would let you shuffle out of any position and there would be no puzzle left. Every deal is built backwards from a finished column, so par is exact rather than estimated: nine moves, with a budget of thirteen.

Colour Sort is the other stack puzzle here — same "top item only" constraint, but the goal is to group like with like rather than to build one run. Deal Sum is the other card game, and it is arithmetic rather than ordering.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.