Letter Chain

You are dealt nine letters and one four-letter word. Every word after it has to open with the letter the last one closed on, be spelled from those same nine letters, and be a word you have not already played. Spell enough of them in a row and the round is yours.

The catch is not vocabulary, it is the letter you leave behind. Finish on a letter that nothing opens with and the chain stops dead, however many words you knew a moment ago.

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. Read the chain at the top. The first word was dealt to you; its last letter is highlighted, and that is the letter your next word must open with.
2. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is outlined.
3. Move across the rack of nine letters with the arrow keys or WASD. Left and right step one letter, up and down step a whole row. The cursor clamps at the ends rather than wrapping.
4. Take a letter with Enter or Space. The first slot is already filled in for you — the letter the chain forced — so each word costs you three picks.
5. Watch the number under each letter. It is how many unused words you could still reach by picking it. A letter showing ⊘ 0 finishes nothing from where you are.
6. The word finishes itself on the fourth letter. A real, unplayed word joins the chain. A word that is not on the list, or one you have already played, costs one try.
7. Changed your mind? Press Esc or Backspace, or use the take-a-letter-back button. That is free — only a finished word can cost you.
8. Lost among the letters? Press F to jump the cursor to a letter that still works.
9. Reach the target shown as Chain 3 / 6 before the tries run out and before the chain runs into a letter nothing opens with.

How do you avoid getting stuck in a word chain game?

Choose your last letter first, not your word. In a chain game every word you play is really two decisions — the word itself, and the letter you hand yourself for the next turn — and only the second one can end the round. So before you finish a word, look at how many unused words open with the letter you are about to end on. Ending on a busy letter leaves you a dozen ways out; ending on a quiet one leaves you one, and that one may be a word you have already played. Here the count is printed for every letter under the rack, so the choice is arithmetic rather than nerve: prefer the exit with the most words behind it, and save the thin letters for when you are nearly home. In a typical round about three of the nine letters have nothing at all opening with them — those are not exits, they are walls.

Is the target chain always actually reachable?

Yes, and it is proved before you are shown the letters rather than hoped for afterwards. The generator draws nine letters, collects every word on the list those letters can spell, and then runs a search over the resulting word graph looking for the longest run of distinct words it can actually walk. It does not estimate — it returns the chain itself, word by word. Only when that chain is at least four words long is the round dealt to you, and your target is exactly the length the search proved. If the search were capped or ran out of steps it would report a shorter chain than really exists, never a longer one, so the target can only ever be easier than the letters allow. When you lose, the result card prints the chain that was in there.

What do the numbers under the letters mean?

The number under a letter is how many unused words you could still reach if you took that letter next — so it changes with every pick. At the start of a word it counts words opening with that letter; three picks in, it is only ever 0 or 1, and that 1 is the word you are about to complete. A letter that shows ⊘ 0 cannot lead anywhere: either no word on the list continues what you have spelled, or the only one that does is already in your chain. The separate line under the rack is the strategic version of the same idea — how many words open with each letter, no matter what you are spelling right now. That is the number that decides whether the word you finish leaves you anywhere to go.

Why nine letters instead of the whole dictionary?

Because the whole dictionary makes it a memory contest that never ends, and nine letters make it a puzzle that does. With the language wide open, a chain only stops when a player runs dry, nothing can be proved in advance, and the person with the bigger vocabulary always wins. Restricting every word to nine dealt letters gives a finite set of moves — around 27 words in a typical round, and never fewer than 12 — which is small enough for a solver to search and for you to reason about, and small enough that dead-end letters are countable instead of ambushing you. It swaps recall for planning, which is the part worth practising.

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

None, and there never will be. No currency, no prizes, nothing to buy, no lives to refill, and no wagering of any kind. It is a word puzzle that runs on your own device.

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

Both, with the same rules and the same information. Arrows move across the rack, Enter takes a letter, Esc or Backspace takes one back, F jumps to a letter that still leads somewhere. Every letter is a real button whose spoken label gives the letter, how many words it still reaches and whether the cursor is on it, and the live region announces the chain length, the word being spelled, how many words still match it and how many tries are left after every press. Nothing on the board is carried by colour alone: a letter that leads nowhere carries a ⊘ and the number 0, the forced first slot is drawn differently and labelled separately, and the cursor is an outline as well as a word in the label.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — the nine letters, the word list, the solver that set your target and the scoring. Nothing is fetched while you play, and there is no server involved at any point.

Nine letters per round — two vowels, seven consonants — drawn from this site's own list of 1292 common English four-letter words. Every word in the chain is four letters, spelled only from those nine, and no word may be played twice. The target runs from four to seven words and is the length the solver proved, not a number chosen by hand; the try budget runs from four to seven with it. A typical round can spell about 27 words in total, and about three of the nine letters usually have nothing opening with them at all. There is no timer, no daily streak to protect and no hint button — the counts on the board are the hint, and they are always on.

Word Ladder is the other planning-first word game here: it changes one letter at a time and asks you to reach a target word. Word Hunt is the reading-first one — six words are already on the board and the work is seeing them. Anagram Rush gives you the letters and keeps the words hidden, which is the opposite half of the same skill.

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