Tether - A word ladder puzzle where every rung has its own clue

Hi Product Hunt 👋 Word ladders were invented by Lewis Carroll in the 1870s and the format has barely changed since: here's DOG, here's CAT, change one letter at a time. I've always loved the idea, but in practice a ladder is either instantly obvious or a brick wall – with nothing to aim at, you're just brute-forcing letters. Tether's one change is putting a clue on every rung. You're never guessing blindly, you're solving four small clues that happen to be chained together one letter at a time. That small change makes it feel less like a brain teaser and more like a crossword you climb. The hard part was generating the puzzles. Making a chain where every word is one letter apart is easy. Making one where every word is common enough that a normal person would actually get there is not – a huge number of technically valid ladders got thrown away because they leaned on words nobody uses. Most of the work went into filtering by word frequency rather than into the game itself. Two other things worth saying. First, I'm not a developer. I built this in Unity with AI as my pair programmer, which was its own education. Second, I ran a 14-day closed test before launching, and the first-run walkthrough, the in-app rate button and the privacy/terms links all exist because testers asked for them. It's free, has no ads, needs no account and works offline. Coins for hints are optional – you get 2 free hints a day plus a daily spin. I'd genuinely love to hear which rung you get stuck on. Happy to answer anything.