Letter Ladder
A daily word-ladder puzzle game. Each day features three puzzles (Easy, Medium, Hard) — climb from a short starting word to a longer final word, one valid word at a time, each step exactly one letter longer than the last.
Live at letterladder.io.
How it works
Given a starting word and a final word, fill in every word "rung" in between, each one letter longer than the last and reachable by rearranging/adding to the previous rung's letters (using the letter bank provided). Solve all three tiers to complete the day.
Features
- Three daily puzzles — Easy, Medium, Hard, each with its own letter bank and word chain
- Timed and untimed modes — hints add a time penalty in timed mode
- Accounts — username/password sign-up, optional recovery email for password resets, guest play supported
- Leaderboards — today's top times per tier, plus a Past Leaderboards archive
- Stats page — played/solved/streak tracking per tier, plus a time-summary table (best time, your average, and the global average per tier, sourced from the same leaderboard data)
- Cross-device sync — signed-in accounts sync in-progress puzzle state, stats, and timer preference across devices/browsers via Firestore
- Drag-and-drop letter bank — reorder tiles with a live positional preview before dropping
- Past Puzzles archive — replay any earlier day's puzzles (untimed, doesn't affect stats/leaderboard)
- Shareable results — copy a Wordle-style result summary after solving
File structure
| File | Purpose |
|---|
index.html | The game itself — puzzle logic, accounts, timer, letter bank, sharing |
about.html | How to play |
leaderboard.html | Today's leaderboard |
past-leaderboards.html | Leaderboard archive by date |
past-puzzles.html | Archive of playable past puzzles |
solutions.html | View a puzzle's solution |
stats.html | Personal stats and time-summary table |
profile.html | Account settings (password, recovery email, logout) |
delete-account.html | Account deletion flow |
contact.html / contact-sent.html | Contact form |
migrate.html | One-time legacy data migration helper |
data/puzzles.js | Daily puzzle schedule (start/final word per tier per date) |
data/hints.js | Hint data per puzzle |
data/words.js | Valid word list used for guess validation |
Tech stack
Static HTML/CSS/vanilla JS — no build step, no framework. Hosted on GitHub Pages.
Firebase (Auth + Firestore) handles accounts and all cross-device data:
players — account records (username, recovery email, created date)playerStats — aggregate stats (played/solved/streaks) and timer-choice preferencescores — individual timed-completion records, powering the leaderboardsdailyProgress — in-progress puzzle state per account per day, enabling cross-device sync
All Firebase config/keys are embedded client-side (standard for Firebase web apps — access is governed by Firestore security rules, not by keeping the config secret).
Known limitations / things to revisit
- Firestore security rules are still in test mode — should be locked down before a full public launch.
- Password-reset emails can take 5–15 minutes to arrive. Firebase's default sender domain is shared across many unrelated projects, which affects deliverability speed. A custom sending domain (via SPF/DKIM) or a dedicated transactional email service would fix this, but both require additional setup (and, for the email-service route, a paid Firebase plan plus a backend function).
- No backend/Cloud Functions — everything currently runs client-side against Firestore directly.
- Custom domain for the password-reset sender was evaluated and deferred due to cost.
Deployment
Static files — push to the main branch (or whichever branch GitHub Pages is configured to serve) and it's live. No build step.
