Whittle

Whittle carves the word rather than replacing it. Each turn offers two moves and only two: DROP removes a letter, ADD inserts one, and the resulting word must remain a valid English word. The day's prompt is shown in plain text under the title, as a sentence like "reach this word from that one", accompanied by a par announced in moves and a counter of moves played. The target word is shown again under the GOAL label, the letters of the current word are clickable, and a message reminds you to switch to ADD to use the keyboard. Below the board are three buttons: Yesterday's Answer, Show Stats and How To Play.

1. Read the day's prompt, which gives the starting word, the target word and the par in number of moves.
2. Choose DROP to remove a letter: the letters of the current word then become buttons; simply pick the one to drop.
3. Switch to ADD to insert one: the message "SWITCH TO ADD TO USE KEYBOARD" indicates that the keyboard only works in this mode.
4. Verify on each turn that the resulting word exists, the rule requiring every intermediate word to be a valid English word.
5. Alternate removals and additions until you reach the target word, watching the move counter against the par.

For an unusually strict constraint: with no right to substitution, the path between two words must necessarily pass through a bottleneck, a short word through which everything must transit. Finding that bottleneck is the real pleasure of Whittle, and the day's par measures the elegance expected.

Feedback fits in the header line, which displays the number of moves played against the day's par, and in the word itself, which shrinks or grows by one letter each turn. There is no color code to decode during play: the tiles remain white and the help panel's example simply shows the successive words in green. The penalty for a bad move is therefore not a greyed-out tile but a lost letter and a consumed move.

Daily

The only mode displayed: the word DAILY appears under the logo, and the browser keeps a numbered daily grid with its par and its history of moves.

• Each turn changes the word's length by exactly one letter: the length gap between the starting word and the target therefore sets an irreducible minimum number of moves.
• Because the game allows no replacements, an intermediate word often needs to be shortened down to a short core before being lengthened toward the target.
• The target word remains shown under the GOAL label throughout the game: its letters indicate which ones to keep when you choose which to remove.