Poople Solver: Shortest Word Ladder to POOP

There is a niche little daily game called Poople that a dad invented to keep his kids busy on road trips. Each day it hands you a random 4-letter word, and your job is to reach POOP in as few steps as possible, changing exactly one letter at a time, where every step has to be a real word. It is a classic word ladder with a wonderfully juvenile target.

So I built a Poople Solver. Type in today's start word and it runs a breadth-first search to find the shortest ladder to POOP, highlighting the one letter that changes on each line in brown (matching the game). It also lists the other equally-short paths, since there are usually several.

The dictionary problem, and the fix

The tricky part of any word-ladder solver is the dictionary. Mine uses the public-domain ENABLE word list, which is comprehensive but not identical to whatever list Poople uses. Every so often the shortest path runs through a word that is valid English but that Poople rejects (PIMA was the one that tripped us up getting from PINK to POOP).

The fix: every word in the path has a small × button. Click it and the solver throws that word out and reroutes around it. Rejected words are remembered on your device, so once you learn Poople doesn't take PIMA, you never see it again.

It joins the Wordle and Hardle solvers in the games collection. Free, ad-free, and it runs entirely in your browser. Go get unstuck.