Crossclimb on LinkedIn: rules, ladders and how the end clues work
Crossclimb is the word-ladder game on LinkedIn. Five clues give you five words, you put them in an order where each word differs from the next by one letter, and that order unlocks the top and bottom words of the ladder. This guide covers where the game came from, the rules as LinkedIn states them, one whole ladder solved rung by rung, and what 111 past ladders show about their length, their letters and the wording of the end clues. This site is not affiliated with LinkedIn.
Where Crossclimb came from
Crossclimb launched on May 1, 2024, with Pinpoint and Queens, as one of the first three LinkedIn games. LinkedIn’s launch post described it in one line: “Crossclimb uses trivia to create a word ladder that will unlock two final clues.” The wider history of the eight games is in the LinkedIn games guide.
Early reviewers found it the hardest of the three to explain. TechCrunch said it was “harder than it looks”, The Verge said it seemed “a touch on the confusing side”, and Business Insider described it as five words worked out from clues and arranged in order, each changing one letter from the one before.
The ladder itself is older than any app. According to Wikipedia, Lewis Carroll invented the word ladder, and he published puzzles that he called “Doublets” in Vanity Fair from March 1879. Crossclimb adds trivia clues on top.
The rules as LinkedIn states them
The Help Center’s Crossclimb page calls it “a timed trivia game”. Playing it goes like this:
- Click or tap Start game. You see a blank ladder with the top and bottom rungs locked.
- Click or tap a rung to read its clue, and type the word that matches it. Do this for every middle rung.
- Drag and drop the middle rungs into an order where each word differs by one letter from the next.
- When the middle rungs are in the right order, the top and bottom rungs unlock.
- Solve the top and bottom clues and type them in. They are part of the ladder, so they must also differ by one letter from the rung next to them.
The page lists four helpers: Hint reveals a letter of a word; Reveal row shows the entire word; Auto-check, in Settings, checks words as you type and strikes through a wrong one; and Auto-reorder, also in Settings, arranges the middle words for you once they are right, which unlocks the top and bottom rungs.
A ladder rung by rung: Crossclimb #920
Here is a finished ladder, Crossclimb #920 from November 6, 2026. It has seven rungs. The five middle clues give these words, listed here from CHOP to WOOD (the ladder reads the same from WOOD to CHOP):
| Rung | Clue | Word | Letter that changes from the rung above |
|---|---|---|---|
| End | Shared end clue | CHOP | |
| 2 | Place to make a purchase | SHOP | C to S |
| 3 | Opportunity | SHOT | P to T |
| 4 | Black stuff in a chimney | SOOT | H to O |
| 5 | Sound an owl makes | HOOT | S to H |
| 6 | It’s attached to some jackets | HOOD | T to D |
| End | Shared end clue | WOOD | H to W |
On this puzzle the game listed the middle rungs scrambled, so you start with five words and no order. The ladder is a chain, and the chain gives the order away: SHOP and SHOT share three letters, SHOT and SOOT share three, SOOT and HOOT share three, and HOOT and HOOD share three.
The ends come last, and they tend to be the hardest to guess from their clue alone. That clue for #920 reads “A two-word phrase for what someone working in forestry might do with an axe.” It fits “chop wood”. The ladder narrows it down too: one end word must be one letter away from SHOP, and the other one letter away from HOOD. CHOP differs from SHOP by one letter, and WOOD differs from HOOD by one letter.
The end clue ends with a note in most ladders: “Keep in mind: The first word may be at the bottom.” It warns that the phrase can read in the opposite direction from the ladder. Either way, it is the same seven words.
A second ladder: Crossclimb #917
Crossclimb #917 from November 3 shows a different way in. Listed from PINE to CONE, its middle rungs are:
| Clue | Word | Letter that changes from the word above |
|---|---|---|
| High-quality, like some dining | FINE | P to F |
| Source of warmth in cold weather | FIRE | N to R |
| Warning a golfer yells | FORE | I to O |
| Accidentally did damage to, as a page of a book | TORE | F to T |
| ___ of voice (indicator of emotion) | TONE | R to N |
The shared end clue reads “A two-word phrase for a certain evergreen tree’s seed-bearing organ”, which is “pine cone”. Here the end clue is the easy part. A player who sees “pine cone” early can put PINE and CONE in place and then work inward, because FINE is one letter from PINE and TONE is one letter from CONE. Another player might start from the sure answers, FORE and FIRE, which differ by one letter, and build the chain outward. Both routes end in the same order.
Using the patterns
None of this is a rule from LinkedIn, but the counts suggest a few habits:
- Start with the middle clues you are sure of. Two answers that differ by one letter are candidates to sit next to each other.
- Expect the first letter to be the one that changes between neighbors.
- Expect four-letter words on a weekday: all 80 Monday to Friday ladders in the record used them. Five- and six-letter ladders appeared only on weekends.
- Read the end clue last, but read its opening: “A compound word” means one word, and “A two-word phrase” means two.
- Use the game’s own helpers in order of how much they give away. Hint reveals one letter of a word. Reveal row shows the whole word.
What 111 past ladders look like
To see what Crossclimb puzzles are like in general, we analyzed a public record of the daily puzzles, the linkedin-games-archive on GitHub. It covers July 19 to November 6, 2026: 111 ladders, which are #810 to #920 on puzzle numbers, one per day with no gaps. It is a third-party record, so the counts are of the ladders it lists. For #909 to #920 we compared it with this site’s own database, and the ladders hold the same words.
Every ladder has seven rungs. Five middle rungs have their own clue, and the top and bottom share one clue. In all 111 ladders, the two end rungs carry the identical clue text. Every word differs from the next by one letter in all 111.
Word length depends on the day. Every Monday to Friday ladder in the record used four-letter words: 80 of 80. Five-letter ladders only appeared on weekends, and six-letter ones only on Sundays:
| Day | 4 letters | 5 letters | 6 letters | Ladders |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday to Friday | 80 | 0 | 0 | 80 |
| Saturday | 10 | 5 | 0 | 15 |
| Sunday | 7 | 7 | 2 | 16 |
| All | 97 | 12 | 2 | 111 |
LinkedIn’s Help Center does not state this schedule, so it is a pattern in about 16 weeks of ladders.
The first letter changes most often. Across the 111 ladders there are 666 steps from one rung to the next. The changed letter was the first one in 214 steps (32%), the third in 160, the fourth in 146, the second in 131, the fifth in 13 and the sixth in 2. So when you build the order, look first at words that match in everything but the first letter.
The ends are far apart. In 99 of the 111 ladders the top and bottom words differ in at least three letters (61 differ in four letters, 36 in three, 2 in five). Two of them differ in just one. So the ends are rarely close to each other, and they only connect through the five middle words.
How end clues are worded
The shared end clue describes the two end words together. In the 111 ladders it opens in these ways:
| Opening of the end clue | Ladders | Example |
|---|---|---|
| “A two-word phrase …” | 32 | A two-word phrase describing pieces of furniture that can be stacked to allow two people to sleep above and below each other (BUNK and BEDS) |
| “A compound word …” | 26 | A compound word for an aquatic animal that inflates its stomach (BLOW and FISH) |
| “Two words …” (that complete an idiom, that mean the same thing, and so on) | 12 | Two words to describe someone intelligent (SMART and SHARP) |
| “A hyphenated word …” | 4 | A hyphenated word meaning to engage in different sporting activities (TRAIN and CROSS) |
| Other wording | 37 | Two parts of the face (CHIN and NOSE) |
In 96 of the 111, the clue ends with the note “Keep in mind: The first word may be at the bottom.” One more says “The first name” instead of “word”. Fourteen have no note. When you see a clue that starts “A compound word”, the two ends join with no space, as in BLOW and FISH. When it starts “A two-word phrase”, they stay separate words.
Scoring, sharing and the streak
The Help Center describes Crossclimb as timed and your goal as solving it as quickly as you can, but it does not publish a scoring formula or say what a hint or a revealed row costs. The results page shows your score compared with averages for all members, your company, CEOs and others. You can post your score, send it to connections or copy it (score sharing). A win counts toward your streak; the LinkedIn games guide covers streaks, leaderboards and how to control who sees your score.
Where to play Crossclimb
LinkedIn’s page on finding games lists the places: the Games hub, your Feed, the My Network page, the Today’s Games section under LinkedIn News on the desktop homepage, the side panel of the mobile app, Search and notifications. Crossclimb can also be played in guest mode without an account, with the limits that guest mode sets: the score is kept for 30 minutes and no streak is kept. A new ladder arrives at midnight Pacific Time, and the previous one expires, so an old ladder can only be read about, not played. That is what the archive below is for.
Quick answers
Is there a prize? No. LinkedIn says there are no prizes for solving its games.
Can I play yesterday’s ladder? Not on LinkedIn. The previous ladder expires at midnight Pacific Time. Past ladders are in the Crossclimb archive here.
Do all the words have the same length? Within one ladder, yes: in the record, every word on a ladder had the same number of letters, because each differs from the next by one letter.
Must the ends be guessed first? No. They unlock only after the middle rungs are in the right order, so the middle comes first.
Crossclimb on this site
You cannot play Crossclimb here. A ladder page shows the clue for each of the five middle rungs, a hint for the whole ladder and, behind a tap per rung, the word. The top and bottom rungs open last, as in the game, and a button shows all rungs at once. Nothing opens by scrolling.
Today’s ladder is on the Crossclimb page. Earlier ladders, grouped by month, are in the Crossclimb archive. The other two games have their own guides: LinkedIn Pinpoint and LinkedIn Queens. How the pages are made and checked is on the method page.
Written and checked by the Pinpoint Today editors. How we make these pages