Word Terrarium

Grow Worlds from Words.

Word Terrarium is a cozy word-ladder game. Turn one word into another by changing a single letter at a time — and every word you make grows the tiny world in the jar beside it. COLD becomes CORD becomes CARD becomes WARD becomes WARM, and by the end there is a hillside, a cottage, a lantern in the window and a pond you did not have when you started.

There is no keyboard. Changing a word is two taps: touch a letter, then touch one of the leaves that appears. Only letters that make a real word are ever offered, so "that isn't a word" simply never happens. The puzzle is which way through, not is this allowed.

208 handcrafted puzzles across ten shelves. Every ladder is hand-picked and machine-checked, from one-move sprouts to eleven-move rare blooms. First Sprouts, The Sunny Shelf, Rainy Window, Windowsill Pots, Autumn Desk, Winter Bottles, The Tide Shelf, Night Garden, The Wild Grove, Rare Blooms.

Every world is different, and so is every route through it. What grows comes from the words you played — a fox, a moon, a pine, a lantern, 39 things in all — so two players who solve the same puzzle by different routes end up with different worlds. Most puzzles have more than one way through, and a finished world remembers every route it has been grown by. Tap one and the jar recomposes itself.

A daily journey. One world a day, the same for everybody, with a twelve-week archive behind it. Miss a day and you can still grow it later — the day fills in, and so does your run. There is nothing in this game that punishes you for putting it down.

Your garden follows you. Finished worlds sync through your own iCloud account, so a new phone opens on the same shelf. Everything works offline, and works exactly the same with iCloud switched off.

Made to be kind. No timers. No lives. No energy. No streak nagging. No ads. No subscriptions. No hints to buy — the hint is free, unlimited, and if you would rather just be shown the way, that is free too.

Accessibility. VoiceOver reads the jar as well as the tiles: what has grown, what your words built, and which words are already on the vine. Dynamic Type scales every font in the game, there is a larger-tiles setting of its own, and Reduce Motion, Increase Contrast and Differentiate Without Color are all respected.

Languages. The interface is available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. The word puzzles themselves are in English — the ladders and the world names are the game rather than its chrome, and a world called Molehill Meadow is named after MOLE → HILL.

One price, the whole game.