Every day you get a starting word and three rules. Find three words, one per rule, so that the four words hand the baton to one another and come back round to the first.

Two words link up when the last letters of the first are the first letters of the second. Every shared letter is worth one point.

A link can't cover a whole word, neither the one before nor the one after. All four words must be different.

The starting word links to the first, the first to the second, the second to the third, and the third back to the starting word. Each word must follow the rule written above its row.

Type with the keyboard and press Enter to confirm a word. Linked letters light up.

Your score is the sum of the linked letters across the four connections. The par is the score of an ideal game, played with the most common English words: with rarer words you can even beat it. When all three words are valid, press Complete.

Stars depend on how far you are from the par. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ if you reach or beat it; then you lose one star for every point short of it in puzzles with a par below 10; if the par is 10 or more, you lose one star for every 10% of the par. The minimum is ⭐. No stars if you give up.

Rules cover the length, the number of vowels or consonants, repeated letters, alphabetical order, the first or last letter or ending, letter sequences (like «TH» or «STR») or the type of word (noun, adjective, verb). Y counts as a vowel unless it starts the word or sits next to another vowel, so it is a vowel in «happy» and «myth» but not in «yes» or «eyes». J, K, W and X count as consonants. A word counts as a noun or an adjective in any of its forms (plurals included); a verb must be in its base form («run», not «ran»).

There's a new Ouroboword every day; from the Archive you can play previous days.