Werdy - A New Daily Word Ladder Game That Ends at NERDY

4 min read

I made a word game. It's called Werdy, it's in beta, and it exists because PIZZA betrayed me.

The PIZZA problem

The plan was simple. I love Pizza, Wordle, and Poople (the daily word ladder where you change one letter at a time until you reach POOP). So: a word ladder game that ends at PIZZA. Perfect. Ship it.

Except before building it, we ran the graph analysis. Take all 12,970 valid five-letter Wordle guess words, connect any two that differ by exactly one letter, and ask: what connects to PIZZA?

def neighbors(w, wordset):
    out = []
    for i in range(5):
        for c in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz":
            cand = w[:i] + c + w[i+1:]
            if cand != w and cand in wordset:
                out.append(cand)
    return out

>>> neighbors("pizza", all_12970_words)
[]

Nothing. Not one word in the entire dictionary is a single letter away from PIZZA. That double-Z next to a final A is a bunker. No ladder can ever reach it, from anywhere, no matter how clever you are. PIZZA is what graph theory calls an isolated node and what I call a huge disappointment.

It's not alone, either: 814 of the 12,970 words are unreachable islands. ROBOT is one of them. So is DONUT. The nerdiest possible targets, all mathematically excluded from the genre.

Finding a target that actually works

So we went looking for a target word that is actually well connected, and the answer was staring back from the domain name: NERDY. It has six one-letter neighbors (NEEDY, NERVY, NERDS, and friends), it sits inside the giant connected component that covers ninety percent of the dictionary, and it is, objectively, on brand.

Every daily start word is a recognizable word from the curated Wordle answer pool, pre-screened so the shortest possible solution (par) is 4 to 7 moves. There are 1,054 of them queued up, which means the daily rotation doesn't repeat a start word until 2029. I'll take that bet.

How Werdy works

  • Every day you get a start word. Change exactly one letter at a time to reach NERDY.
  • Every step must be a real word from the 12,970-word Wordle guess dictionary.
  • Par is the length of the shortest possible ladder. Match it for maximum nerdiness.
  • Stuck? Undo a step, or give up and the game reveals the optimal path.
  • Win and you get a full-screen shower of nerd emoji, iMessage-echo style. This is the most important feature and I will not be taking questions.

Everything runs in your browser. There's no backend, no account, and no tracking: the daily puzzle is picked deterministically from your local date, and your streak lives in localStorage on your own device. The give-up reveal runs a breadth-first search over the whole dictionary right there in the page.

Why "Werdy"?

Nerdle exists and is a (very good) math game, so that name was out. Werdy was free, sounds right, and the domain of confusion with "wordy" seemed acceptable. Naming things remains one of the two hard problems.

Play Werdy here. It's in beta - if a word gets rejected that shouldn't be, or the emoji rain gives your phone feelings, tell me about it.

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