The dankpuzzles puzzle page
Printable word ladders, nonograms, box puzzles, bridges puzzles and lamps puzzles
This week’s word ladders, picture puzzles, box puzzles, bridges puzzles and lamps puzzles on paper: page 1 holds 7 word ladders, page 2 holds 7 nonograms, page 3 holds 7 box puzzles (Quoin, the rectangles puzzle), page 4 holds 7 bridges puzzles (Ligature), page 5 holds 7 lamps puzzles (Lampblack), page 6 has every answer. Black ink only, sized for A4 and US Letter.
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Typeslide, the sliding-tile daily, is not on this page: its tiles have to slide, and paper does not.
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Word ladders
Change one letter at a time to turn the first word into the second; every rung must be a real word, and letters never move. Each ladder has as many rungs as its par (the fewest steps), and the last rung is the second word.
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Nonograms
The numbers beside each row and above each column are the runs of filled squares in that line, in order, with at least one empty square between runs. Fill exactly the squares that fit every line and a small picture appears; its name is on page 6. Every one can be solved by reasoning alone, without guessing.
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Box puzzles
Draw along the grid lines to split the whole grid into boxes (rectangles). Each box holds exactly one number, and that number is how many squares the box covers: a 2 is two squares side by side, a 6 is 2 × 3, 3 × 2, 1 × 6 or 6 × 1. Every square ends up in exactly one box. Each puzzle has exactly one answer, reached by reasoning alone, without guessing; the answers are on page 6.
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Bridges puzzles
Join the numbered circles (islands) with straight lines across or down, each line running to the nearest island in its row or column. Each number is how many lines touch that island; two islands share at most two lines (a double); lines never cross each other or pass over an island; and at the end every island is linked to every other through the lines. The dots only mark the empty squares. Each puzzle has exactly one answer, reached by reasoning alone, without guessing; the answers are on page 6.
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Lamps puzzles
Draw a circle for a lamp on some of the white squares. A lamp lights its own square and its whole row and column in all four directions, until a black wall or the edge of the grid stops the light; light never turns a corner. Every white square must end up lit, and no lamp may light another lamp. A wall with a number touches exactly that many lamps on its four sides (corners do not count); a wall with no number takes any number. A small dot in a square you have ruled out helps. Each puzzle has exactly one answer, reached by reasoning alone, without guessing; the answers are on page 6.
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Answers
The answers print on page 6. On screen they stay hidden until you tap “Show the answers” above.
Word ladders, at par
Another route of the same length is just as good: par only counts the steps.
Nonograms
Box puzzles
Bridges puzzles
Lamps puzzles
What is on the sheets
The dailies. Every word ladder, nonogram, box puzzle, bridges puzzle and lamps puzzle here is one of the site’s daily puzzles from before today, newest first: today’s puzzles are never printed, so a printout cannot spoil the one you have not played yet. Each carries its number and date, the same as on the daily word ladder, the daily nonogram, the daily box puzzle, the daily bridges puzzle and the daily lamps puzzle, so you can check a paper answer against the past puzzles there.
The extras. The ladder and the nonogram began on 20 October 2026, the box puzzle on 23 October and the bridges and lamps puzzles on 24 October, so until 27 October (box puzzles: 30 October, bridges and lamps puzzles: 31 October) there are fewer than seven past puzzles of each kind. The gaps are filled with puzzles marked “Extra”: practice ladders drawn by the same code and rules as the daily ladders (4 letters, par 4 to 7, start, end and par route made of common words, never a pair from the daily calendar), pictures from the 40-picture book on the nonogram page, and box puzzles made by the same generator as the daily ones, taking turns at easy 7 × 7, middle 8 × 8 and hard 9 × 9 (never the Sunday level, the one that needs a trial-and-error step), each checked to have exactly one answer; bridges puzzles the same way, from the bridges generator, in the same three levels in turn, each solved again by the site’s own step-by-step solver (which only finishes a board with exactly one answer) and never the same board as a daily one, even turned or mirrored; lamps puzzles the same way again, from the lamps generator, in the same three levels in turn, each re-solved by the lamps solver and never a daily board turned or mirrored. The extras change once a week, so the page prints the same all day.
Honest limits. On paper nobody checks your words. The site accepts 3,887 four-letter words as moves, and every par route on page 1 uses only the 1,885 most common of them (for the five-letter Sunday ladders: 3,480 of 8,614), so a rung you would find in an ordinary dictionary is almost always fine. If your route comes out shorter than par, it goes through a rarer word than the par routes use, or a word the site does not list. A 10 by 10 nonogram on page 2 is printed with squares about 4 mm wide (8 by 8: 5.5 mm), which suits a sharp pencil; if that is too small for you, print the page at a larger scale and it will take more sheets. The box puzzles on page 3 print about 6 mm a square (9 × 9) to 7.5 mm (7 × 7), roomy enough to rub out a wrong line; their answers on page 6 are small, 2.5 to 3.2 mm a square, with each box outlined around its number. The bridges puzzles on page 4 print at the same size as the box puzzles, an island about 5 mm across; draw a double as two lines side by side. Their answers on page 6 are small too, with a double drawn as two thin lines. The lamps puzzles on page 5 print at the same size again, 6 mm (9 × 9) to 7.5 mm (7 × 7) a square, room for a pencilled circle in a lamp square and a dot in a ruled-out one; walls print solid black with their number in white, which uses more ink than the other sheets. On page 6 each lamp is a filled black circle on a grid of 2.5 to 3.2 mm a square.
Want a puzzle nobody else has? Make a word ladder or draw a nonogram for a friend; both print with the answer on its own page.
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What we count
Each visit adds one to a count for the page’s address, nothing more. This page adds one tally, a fixed name with no puzzle number, no cookie and nothing about you. It goes up by one when:
print-openyou open the print dialog on this page, with the Print button or your browser’s own Print (once per visit)
How to use the puzzle page
This page puts a week of the site’s word ladders, nonograms, box puzzles, bridges puzzles and lamps puzzles on paper: six printed pages, built in your browser from the same puzzles as the daily games, with every answer on a page of its own. It is free, needs no account, and prints in black ink only.
Step by step
- Open the page and wait a moment. The note under the heading says how many of the 35 puzzles are past dailies and how many are extras; the Print button wakes up when the sheets are ready.
- Look the sheets over on screen. The ladders, the empty nonograms, the empty box puzzles, the bridges puzzles and the lamps puzzles are shown above; the answers stay folded away until you tap Show the answers.
- Tap Print (or use your browser’s own Print). The preview should show six pages: ladders, nonograms, box puzzles, bridges puzzles, lamps puzzles, answers. A4 and US Letter both fit; switching off the browser’s own headers and footers in the dialog gives a cleaner sheet.
- Solve with a pencil, then check against page 6, or against the same numbered puzzle on the daily game pages.
Worked example: the sheet on 22 October 2026
Page 1 opened with the ladder labelled “#2 · Wed 21 Oct”: CAGE → PUNY · 5 steps, CAGE drawn in squares, then five numbered empty rungs, the fifth outlined more heavily because it has to spell PUNY. Under it came #1 from Tue 20 Oct, AXES → DOGS in 4 steps, then five ladders marked Extra 1 to Extra 5, because the dailies only began on 20 October.
Page 2 opened with nonogram #2, an 8 × 8 grid with the row numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 2 1, 6 down its side and its title kept back. Page 3 held seven box puzzles, all marked Extra because the daily box puzzle only starts on 23 October. Extra 1, an easy 7 × 7, has a 3 in its top-left corner with a 2 right under it, so the 3 cannot run down and is the strip of three along the top row. The 5 near the foot of the left edge cannot run across (a 3 sits beside it) or start higher (it would swallow that 2), so it is the strip of five down to the bottom corner, and the 2 is left only the domino beside it. Page 4 held seven bridges puzzles, all Extra because the daily bridges puzzle starts on 24 October. In Extra 1, an easy 7 × 7, the 4 near the top-right corner has only two neighbours, the 3 to its left and the 5 below it, so it takes a double line to each; that leaves the 3 one line, which can only go down to the 3 below it. The 1 on the left edge can only join the 5 under it, and that 5 then needs four more from its two other neighbours: a double to each. Page 5 held seven lamps puzzles, all Extra too, since the daily lamps puzzle also starts on 24 October. In Extra 1, an easy 7 × 7, the 3 in row 4, column 3 has a wall (a 1) on its left, so only three free sides are left and all three take a lamp; the lamp below it lights the squares to its left in row 5, so the 1 in row 4, column 2 has a single free side left, the square on the left edge, and its lamp goes there. Page 6 held the answers: CAGE → CANE → CANS → PANS → PUNS → PUNY for the ladder, the filled grid of #2 with its title, “A house”, the 13 boxes of box Extra 1 the 12 links of bridges Extra 1, 6 of them double, and the 11 lamps of lamps Extra 1.
The puzzles move on each day: tomorrow’s sheet starts with yesterday’s daily, and today’s own puzzles are never printed.
For teachers and classes
For a class set, print pages 1 to 5 as many times as you need (in the print dialog, set Pages to 1-5 and choose the number of copies), then print page 6 once as your answer key. Because the sheet moves on at midnight UTC, print the whole set on the same day so every pupil gets the same puzzles; each page carries its date in the top line, which makes a stray copy easy to spot. The 8 × 8 nonograms print with squares about 5.5 mm wide and the 10 × 10 ones about 4 mm, so for younger pupils print page 2 on its own at a larger scale (it then spreads over two or three sheets) or hand out sharp pencils. The ladders suit pupils who read fluently; for a younger group, the word ladder maker makes a single three-letter ladder with bigger squares. When marking a ladder, any route with the same number of steps is right, as long as each rung is a real word that changes one letter. A box puzzle has only one right answer, so a pupil’s boxes either match page 5 exactly or one of them is wrong; the easy 7 × 7 ones make a good first try, and saying “start with a number that has only one place to go” is usually all the help a class needs. A bridges puzzle also has only one answer; the tip that starts most of them is “find an island whose number is as big as its neighbours allow: a 4 in a corner with two neighbours has a double to each”. For a lamps puzzle it is “look for a number that has exactly as many free sides as its number, then fill them all”, and a pupil can check a finished grid alone: every white square lit, no two lamps in sight of each other.