The disappearing staircase
Shrinking Staircase
Remove one letter. Keep a real word.
No daily editions of Shrinking Staircase are published yet. These are practice rounds: original, machine-validated and clearly labelled, but not yet through human editorial review. Difficulty labels are the author's intention, not calibrated evidence.
Master rounds are written for strong tile-game and cryptic-crossword players: obscure but valid vocabulary, denser puzzles and fewer helping hands. They are the hardest rounds here.
Gentle 14 rounds
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Standard 14 rounds
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Expert 20 rounds
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Master 14 rounds
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How to play
Start from the word at the top. On each step down, remove exactly one letter, rearrange the rest and answer the clue.
Stepping down
- The first word is given. Each rung below has a clue and is exactly one letter shorter than the rung above.
- Make the answer from all the letters of the word above except one. You may rearrange them freely.
- You can never add a letter or swap one letter for another. If a letter appears twice, you may remove one of them and keep the other.
- Your answer must fit the clue as well as the letters: another word made from the same letters is not accepted.
- Rungs are solved in order, because each one is built from the answer above. Gentle, Standard and Expert staircases end on a familiar two-letter word; Master staircases end on a three- or four-letter word.
- Type your answer, or tap the letter tiles, then press Submit (or Enter). A rejected answer stays in the box so you can fix it.
More than one right answer
- Some rungs accept two answers that both fit the clue, for example two spellings of the same word or two words for the same idea made from the same letters.
- Every accepted answer has been checked to lead all the way to the bottom, and later clues follow the answer you chose.
Changing an earlier answer
- Use Revise on a solved rung to reopen it. Answers below it depend on it, so they are cleared after you confirm.
- Hints you have already taken stay on your record.
Scoring
- Each rung you solve is worth an equal share of 100 points; the total is rounded once at the end.
- Wrong guesses never cost points and there is no timer.
- A rung filled by a hint scores 0. Revealing the whole staircase ends the round as revealed.
- When you finish, the result shows which letter left at each step and how the rest were rearranged.
Hints
- Letter to remove: names the letter to take out for the current rung, including which one when it appears twice.
- First letter: shows how the current answer begins (after the first hint).
- Fill this rung: completes the current rung and explains the rearrangement. That rung scores 0.
- Reveal the whole staircase: shows every remaining answer and ends the round.
- Hints always follow the answers you have chosen so far.
Difficulty
- Gentle: five-letter starts, three rungs, direct clues, and the letter tiles are shown.
- Standard: six-letter starts, four rungs and tighter clues. The tiles are available if you ask for them.
- Expert: seven- or eight-letter starts, five or six rungs, repeated letters and some rungs with two accepted answers.
- Master: eight- to ten-letter starts that step down to a three- or four-letter word over five or six rungs. Clues are short and crossword-style, no tiles are shown, and answers may be uncommon words that a strong word-game player will know. Every step rearranges the letters. Where the larger word list allows a second legal word at a rung, the clue is written to point to one answer; a Master round says so when it accepts both of two spellings.
- Each difficulty is a different set of staircases. These labels are the author's intention and have not yet been calibrated with players.
Example
STONE, then remove S for TONE (the quality of a sound), then remove T for ONE, then remove E for ON. STONE to TUNE is not allowed: U was never there.
Release status for Shrinking Staircase
- Engine rules and tests: passed · Pure engine with multiset checks, branch-aware hints, revision and reveal; unit tests plus exact chain validator
- Browser walkthrough (keyboard, touch, refresh, hint, completion): passed · tests/e2e/shrinking-staircase.spec.ts
- Human editorial review of every round: open
- Reviewed practice bank (10+ rounds per advertised difficulty): open
- 30 scheduled reviewed daily editions: open
- Approved dictionary membership layer: open
- Observed player pilot and difficulty calibration: open
- Manual screen-reader and real-device checks: open