jethro,
Rather than fail with words, I will try not to fail with an example: 
Level 1
9:  moon
10: noon
Level 2
11: loon
(Can not use 'l' for the rest of level 2)

[download]

Actually, I think it is the letter to make the last word from level 1 that becomes unavailable for level 2 but it really doesn't change the problem. Perhaps I haven't worked with graphs and graph theory enough to understand how continuing to think about this as a graph helps. According to Wikipedia, this is an NP complete problem. Since I indicated I am fine with a suboptimal solution I want to stick to something simple and fast. Do you think this approach would produce solutions consistently better than my drop dead simple approach outline in the root node with a run-time under an hour?

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re^2: Not Quite Longest Path Problem by Limbic~Region
in thread Not Quite Longest Path Problem by Limbic~Region

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