Editor’s Updates

Two changes this week, and both of them came straight out of your feedback.

Shrooms. You've been loving the challenge, but Medium and Hard were proving genuinely tough — tough enough that a few of you assumed Medium wasn't solvable by deduction alone. (It is, we promise.) The ask was clear: harder puzzles should be worth more. So they are now — +25 points on Medium and +75 on Hard, spelled out in the scoring panel so you can see exactly where it came from. One caveat: solves you'd already banked keep their original totals, so your older Medium and Hard runs will read a little low next to new ones.

Droplet. The Tetris-meets-Scrabble mashup has fans, but building words was far too chaotic — and you were right about the vowels, especially the letter I. Quite a lot changed:

• The letter bag is retuned. Fewer vowels overall, a lot fewer I's, and considerably more S's. We've dropped J, Q, X and Z entirely and put three wildcards in their place — worth nothing on their own, but they'll finish any word of four letters or more.
• Vowel floods are capped. A run of four or more vowels used to turn up in 93% of blocks. It's now zero: three in a row is the hard ceiling.
• Long words finally pay. A six-letter word used to be worth barely more than a three-letter one. Length now multiplies your score, up to 8× at eight letters.
• A hold slot and a three-deep queue. Park an awkward tile for later (tap it, or press C), and see what's coming next.
• Everything falls slower, which is what makes all of the above actually usable.
• Bonus squares stay visible once a tile lands on top of them, and they're properly outlined in dark mode — previously they just disappeared.

Still on our list for Droplet: an extra column to give you more room to work with, and color-coding the letter types.

Thank you for the notes on both of these. This one was almost entirely reader-driven, so please keep them coming!

New daily game, and this one comes with a story attached: you're helping Odysseus get home to Ithaca. Flood the map one color at a time until there's a single unbroken stretch of sea between him and where he needs to be.

Two things make it different from other flood games you may have played:

• It's a path rule, not a fill rule. You're opening a route, not just painting the board.
• There's a hard cap on allowed moves, rather than a par move count to target. This means you can lose by running out of moves!

Have a go, and if you want the longer story of how it came together, we wrote it up on the blog.

Thanks as always for playing, and please keep the feedback coming — it really does help inform what we build next!

A few small feature updates, and we launched a leaderboard!

• Passwords, if you want one. Magic links still work exactly as before, but you can now set a password instead of digging through your inbox every time you log in.
• Leaderboards. Top twenty per board, plus your own best three days on each.
• A proper profile page. Your streak sits right at the top, alongside your current and longest runs and a day-by-day view of everything you've solved across every game. You can edit your display name, roll yourself a new avatar, and — if you ever want to — delete your account and everything attached to it, no email to us required.

Amsterdammed is a simple loop puzzle dressed up as the Amsterdam canals. You trace one continuous canal that runs through every open square and closes back on itself. One loop, no crossings, no loose ends.

IMO, it's the coziest game on the site right now, but it can get stressful later in the week as difficulty increases!

Take a lap, or read the launch note if you'd like the background on why we wanted a loop puzzle in the lineup.

Thank you all for the continued support. The notes you send us genuinely shape what gets made next, so please keep them coming. :)