Fartle

Fartle is a daily word ladder with one destination: FART. Everyone gets the same four-letter start word each day. Change one letter a step, every step has to be a real word, and get to FART in as few steps as you can. Par is the shortest path through everyday words, and a rarer word can sometimes beat it.

Every word you play is a fart, and no two words sound the same. The fart comes from the word's letters, not from a random pick. The vowels set a note on a pentatonic scale, and a real recorded fart is pitch-shifted onto it. The consonants choose what kind of fart it is: stops pop, an S or F hisses, an R flaps, an M or N rumbles. Changing one letter almost always moves the note, so when you reach FART your whole path plays back as a little tune, with a cartoon cloud puffing out of each row. Type a word that isn't a word and you get a raspberry.

There's no practice mode. Fartle is a pure daily, and the long game is your voices. You start on Classic. Finish once for the whoopee cushion, finish on par for the tuba, and play three days in a row for the kazoo. Use a rare word for the tiny dog, and beat par for the bathtub. Then play your tune back on any of them. The share is a spoiler-free grid of which letter you changed each step, and the tune itself as a sound file.

The idea is Jeff's, from seeing Poople, the daily ladder to POOP; Fartle tips its hat to it on the how-to card. The fart recordings are 34 ElevenLabs sound effects, cut into 37 clips and shaped by the letters in Web Audio, with a small synth underneath to hold the note. The clouds are three.js. The promo above is the real game, recorded frame by frame, and every fart in it is the game's own.