Noodle

Noodle is a daily word puzzle by James Small, a puzzle nerd from London, and its twist is that nothing is hidden: the start word is on the board from the first second, and the puzzle is the path away from it. You change the word one letter at a time over four steps, using four adaptations once each. Move shifts one letter to a new position, Add slots a new letter in anywhere, Remove deletes one, and Replace swaps one for a new letter. Every step has to form a real word, and no word may appear twice in a round. There is no target word: some puzzles have thousands of winning paths, and you choose your own. You start with three lives; undoing a step costs one, so does a hint, and a dead end with no lives left is game over. A new puzzle with a new start word arrives every day, and the puzzles get harder as the week goes on, with fewer paths to choose from.

1. Read the start word on the board, then choose one of the four adaptations: Move, Add, Remove or Replace.
2. Build the new word on the bottom line by tapping its letters, then confirm with Submit: it must be a real word that has not appeared in this round.
3. Repeat with the remaining adaptations, one per step, until all four have been used.
4. If the tiles turn red you are at a dead end: use Undo to step back, at the cost of a life.
5. Stuck on the very first step? Tap Hint to have one adaptation type highlighted; it costs a life and is only available on step one.
6. Complete the fourth step to finish, then open Stats or Share; a win with no lives lost counts as a perfect game.

Noodle is for players who find guessing games passive and would rather plan: the word is given, so the whole challenge is ordering four operations so that every intermediate word exists and none repeats. It rewards a stock of short words and the habit of thinking two steps ahead, since spending Remove early can strand you later. Skip it if you want colour feedback and a fixed answer to chase: here there is no target, and the only verdicts are a dead end or a finished chain. A round is exactly four validated steps, and the only budget is three lives.

Noodle gives no colours for closeness because there is nothing to approach. Each submitted step is checked against the word list before it joins the chain. The warning sign is red: when the current word cannot be changed with the adaptations you have left, its tiles turn red to mark a dead end, and the only way out is Undo, which costs a life, as does a Hint. Three lives cover a round, and a dead end with none left is game over. Finishing all four steps completes the puzzle, and doing it without losing a life counts as a perfect game for the achievements and statistics.

Daily puzzle

A new start word every day, harder as the week goes on. Completing puzzles on consecutive days builds a streak, and streak achievements grant a one-day streak freeze.

Practice round

A guided practice game reached from the help panel, played before today's puzzle to learn the four adaptations.

Hard Mode

A setting: no individual tile can be adapted more than once per puzzle, which increases the risk of dead ends.

Fiendish Mode

A setting that introduces a fifth adaptation, Switch, which transposes two letters; all five must be used to win.

• Look for Move first: it accounts for only 2.4 percent of possible adaptations and is one of the hardest to find, so spot it before the other tools reshape the word.
• Keep Replace in reserve: it is the most abundant adaptation, around 58 percent of the database, so it is the easiest to find at any step.
• Add and Remove cannot cancel each other: adding a letter and removing it again would return to a word already used, which the rules forbid.
• Think before you submit rather than after: every Undo costs a life, and with three lives per round a couple of wrong turns leave you one dead end from game over.
• Later in the week, expect fewer paths: puzzles get harder as the week goes on, so plan the whole chain before the first step.
• In Hard Mode each tile can only be adapted once per puzzle, which raises the risk of dead ends; leave it off until standard rounds feel easy.