Fold, a daily anagram word chain
Fold is the plainest of Omeletter's nine games and the one the others are built on. It is a chain of fourteen answers, each with a crossword-style clue, and every answer is made from the letters of the answer before it, give or take one letter.
How it plays
Each answer is an anagram of those next to it with a letter added or removed. Steps that only add or drop a letter don't count, so REVEAL to LEAVE is a step and LEAVER to LEVER is not.
In Fold the chain is free to go up or down as it pleases. One step might add a letter and the next might take one away, so the answers run from three letters to nine or so and back again in no fixed pattern. Each answer shows how many letters it has, so the difference in length between two neighbours tells you whether a letter arrives or goes.
Fold's clues are the gentlest in the box. Every answer gets the easiest of the clues written for it, which makes Fold a good place to start on a morning when you have not played before.
A worked example
This chain was made up for this page and is shorter than a real Fold. It comes from no day's puzzle.
- Definite articleTHEthe first answer
- WarmthHEATan A arrives
- Our planetEARTHan R arrives
- Air taken inBREATHa B arrives
- It pumps the bloodHEARTthe
Bgoes - Speed or priceRATEthe
Hgoes - Very goodGREATa G arrives
EARTH has five letters to HEAT's four, so it holds H, E, A and T plus one more, and the clue says it is the planet. From BREATH the B goes and the rest rearrange into HEART. The last step runs the other way: RATE gains a G and becomes GREAT.
Tips
- Start with whichever clue you can answer, wherever it sits in the chain. A solved answer helps the ones on both sides of it.
- Once a neighbour is solved, the keyboard dims every letter that cannot belong to the answer you are typing.
- The anagram rack, in the bar above the keyboard, lets you push the letters about the way you would on paper.
- Short answers are the easiest way in. A three-letter word leaves very few four-letter words it can grow into.
Fold in the day's four
Omeletter sets four puzzles a day, chosen from its nine games, and every game comes round at least once in any three days. New puzzles appear at 05:00 UTC, which is mid-afternoon in Sydney and early morning in London.
You start with fifty hints in the app and five on the website, and you earn another for every puzzle you solve. On this website you can play today and the two days before it. The app keeps every day you open while it is free.
On the App Store and Google Play.
The other games
All nine are explained side by side on How to play, and every answer comes from the word list.