This is a derivative of a word ladders, or word "doublets", in which a word is intended to be transmuted into a different word through successive alterations of individual letters, presuming each alteration results in a real word, each time. The game can be further altered through the constraints of scoring based on Levenshtein Differences, a way to measure the difference between two words through the number or alterations necessary to morph the starting word into the destination word. Furthermore, the added constraint of reversal can be accomplished, but at the cost of a 2 point addition, and only under the condition that every word up to, but excluding, the last transformation must be a word, with the last transformation being the reverse of the destination word. Scoring is symmetric to golf, in which lower numbers are better scores, and higher numbers are worse scores.
Examples:
[Cat => Dog] Cat -> Cot (+1) -> Dot (+1) => Dog (+1) = LD(3)
[Farm => Harm] Farm => Harm (+1) = LD(1)
[Worn => Brow] Worn -> Worb (not a word, but the reverse of brow) => Brow (+2) = LD(2)