Table of contents

1. About
2. Objective
3. Warning on homophones
4. Standard Puzzles
5. One-Shot Puzzles

About 🔗 🔝

This web app is a singleplayer version of the game show Chain Reaction, but it can be played by multiple people or teams taking turns.

Objective 🔗 🔝

The objective of the game is to complete the word association chain, given its first and last word. Each pair of words in the chain goes together in one or more of the following ways:

• ✅ They form a common phrase: e.g. ice ↔ cream (make ice cream)
• ✅ They form a common compound word: e.g. book ↔ worm (make bookworm)
• ✅ They from a common hyphenated compound word: e.g. scot ↔ free (make scot-free)

Unlike in ITV’s Lucky Ladders, not all word associations are valid pairs, unless they form a compound word or phrase.

• ❌ Word association that does not form a compound word: e.g. wick ↔ candle
• ❌ Synonyms or antonyms: e.g. sharp ↔ flat
• ❌ The formed compound word is backwards: e.g. cream ↔ ice

Warning on homophones 🔗 🔝

Since Shavian spells words based on pronunciation, the same word may be spelled differently in the Latin alphabet depending on the other word it pairs up with! For example, the following is a valid Chain Reaction in the Shavian alphabet, but not in the Latin alphabet:

• 𐑓𐑮𐑰 - free
• 𐑮𐑱𐑯 - rein / rain
• 𐑗𐑧𐑒 - check / Czech
• 𐑮𐑦𐑐𐑳𐑚𐑤𐑦𐑒 - republic

This is nothing new! Remember that words in a Chain Reaction already may stand for two different words with two different meanings in the Latin alphabet. Consider the following:

• FALL
• DOWN
• JACKET

In this puzzle, “down” means “from a higher position to a lower one”, and “immature feathers on young birds, used as insulation”. These two meanings come from different etymologies; the meaning of “lower” comes from Old English dūne, and the meaning of “feather” comes from Old Norse dúnn. They are bona-fide different words with the same spelling!

Just don’t get pigeon-holed into one definition or, indeed, one Latin spelling!

Standard Puzzles 🔗 🔝

• The puzzle begins with a fully revealed first and last word, and some unrevealed words in between (In the latest TV show version, 7 words are in each word chain in total.) The second and second-last words start out available to guess.
• Before guessing, the player must declare which end to guess from (if more than one word is available to guess).
• The first hidden letter from that chosen word gets revealed; if the final letter of that word would be revealed, a question mark is shown instead.
• The player must now guess the word based on existing clues. If the player guesses correctly, the whole word is revealed; if a neighboring word is still hidden, that word is now available to guess.

One-Shot Puzzles 🔗 🔝

• The puzzle consists of a fully revealed first word, a fully revealed last word, and two words in between with their first letter visible.
• The player must guess the middle two words on their first try.
• In the TV show, the contestants only have 7 seconds to think and discuss among themselves.