Word ladder

Tricky Clones solution
Lovely Manors solution
Tough Places solution
Easy Life solution

Just a quick post to give the solutions I have for the word ladders I posted last week. There are sure to be alternative solutions, including one I found already with one less step for TRICKY CLONES as mentioned previously (not shown in the solution here, which uses the given number of steps).

Tough Place
Easy Life

I’ll return to Sudoku very shortly, but today I thought I’d try something completely different.  I’ve been working on various word puzzles for a new book, and thought that I’d post some of them here from time to time.

The attached puzzles here are four regular word ladders, albeit written on their sides if you open and view the PDFs.  They were popularised in the late 19th century by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (so I’m not claiming they’re anything new! ).

Lovely Manors
Tricky Clones

The rules are simple – by changing just one letter at each stage, can you move from the first word to the last word whilst using only standard English words in-between?  I have a solution for each of these, and I’ve avoided any obscure words in order to keep it nice and fair.

For a simple example, you could change THE to SEA in three steps like this:  THE -> SHE ->SEE -> SEE.

(By the way, using an unusual plural you can do the TRICKY CLONES one in one less step than the puzzle shows. )

Incidentally, I’m considering trying diagonal consecutive Sudoku for my next Sudoku puzzle – I just need to decide how to display this on the printed grid!  Hollow slashes between two cells are a bit confusing because they seem to point at two different adjacent cells when they indicate consecutive-ness between diagonal cells (and look odd when they overlap), so I might have to experiment a bit to get it to work nicely.  Perhaps two slashes, one in the corner of each diagonally-consecutive cell, would be best.