May 31, 2026

New

• new A home for the silly ones. Scratch Card, Crocodile Dentist, and Bubble Wrap now live together in a new Silly category · the no-pressure, just-for-fun corner of the catalogue. You'll find them grouped on the home page and in the library menu.

Improved

• improve Laser Bounce is now a real mirror-routing puzzle. Instead of placing a single mirror on a tiny board, you now rotate a grid of mirrors · each snaps to a flat or 45-degree angle (| _ / \) · through empty squares and walls. The beam is drawn live and bends as you turn each mirror, so you can watch it snake toward the target and see the moment it lands.
• improve Gear Train finally looks like a gear train. The row of loose, floating cogs is gone · the gears now interlock as a proper meshed block that winds across rows, and the puzzle grows from a short chain into a multi-row gearbox as the difficulty climbs. The driving gear shows its spin direction and the gear in question is marked, so the "which way does it turn?" call is clear.
• improve Light Up now explains its clues and tells you what is wrong. A short rule line spells out that a number on a black square is exactly how many neighbouring bulbs it needs. Clue numbers turn green the instant they are satisfied (and orange if you over-fill them), and the status line now says whether bulbs are shining on each other, a clue is not met, or cells are still dark · so a fully-lit board that "won't finish" finally tells you why.
• improve Who Made This? now shows the art and plays the music. The painting round draws the actual masterpiece on screen · a Hokusai wave, a Munch scream, a Van Gogh night · and asks who painted it. The music round plays the melody on a piano, keys lighting up as it goes (you listen · you don't have to play it back), then asks who composed it · from Beethoven's Ode to Joy to Mozart, Bach, Chopin and Satie. Pick a topic · Paintings, Music, or Literature · and your best streak is kept per topic. Creator names are translated across all 25 languages.
• improve The Dice Roller now rolls. Tap Roll and every die tumbles through random faces and shakes before landing · and, like a real handful of dice, some come to rest sooner than others instead of all snapping to their number at once. The running total and average count along as the dice settle. (If you prefer reduced motion, it still shows the result instantly.)
• improve Cleaner answer colours in the cognitive games. In Schedule Conflict, Fold-Out, Pattern Recognition and the rest of the reasoning set, the answer cards used to be tinted by their position in the grid · two of them always came out blue for no reason, and one always looked "correct" green. Cards are now plain while you choose, and colour only appears at the reveal: green on the right answer, red on a wrong pick.
• improve Right-sized choice buttons in Pattern Recognition and Spatial Rotation. The little shape and rotated-grid answers no longer sit inside a full-width bar built for long text · they're now compact tiles laid out in a tidy row.
• improve The game library is easier to browse · two new categories. As the catalogue grew, the Reasoning shelf had quietly turned into a catch-all. We split it up: Spatial now gathers rotation, layout and geometry games (Rubik's, Laser Bounce, Mirror Symmetry, Pathfinder…), and Observation collects the attention and perception games (Stroop, Spot the Difference, Where's MemPi, Cups, Whack-a-Mole…). Reasoning keeps the true logic and deduction puzzles. A few games also moved to a clearer home · "Which Philosophy?", Mosaic and Silhouette now sit under Knowledge.
• improve Mirror Symmetry is far more varied. The puzzle used to be the same eight-tile row mirrored left-to-right every single time. Now the grid changes shape and the mirror runs in different directions · two- and four-tile squares, a 3×3, two rows of six, up to a 5×5, reflected left-to-right, top-to-bottom, on both axes at once, or across the diagonal. A faint line shows you which way the grid is meant to be symmetric, and the layouts get bigger and busier as the difficulty climbs.
• improve Every game's pre-start menu now looks the same. The difficulty, topic, and mode pickers you see before pressing Start (on Ordering, History Quiz, Finance, Music, Chess Mate, Sudoku Force and the rest) used to each be styled a little differently · some were rounded chips, some were plain buttons. They now all render through one shared control, so the buttons, spacing, and the way the active choice highlights are identical on every game.
• improve One Settings menu on the Pi game, not two. The digit game used to show its own "Settings" dropdown stacked right above the standard Settings bar. The Pincode-path and Major-system toggles, Sound and Restart now live in the one canonical Settings panel · and your path/major choices now stay set instead of resetting every group.
• improve The Labyrinth's Restart and New-Journey controls moved to the standard Settings panel too. Same story · the labyrinth had its own second "Settings" dropdown. Restart-Level and the Easy/Medium/Hard New-Journey buttons now sit in the one canonical Settings menu.
• improve Circle Puzzle is now a little Swiss-watch movement. The rings became meshed gears: tap the right half of a wheel to turn it clockwise, the left half to turn it counter-clockwise · and every wheel it meshes with turns too, each by a different, hidden amount. The puzzle is now two puzzles · first work out how the wheels drive each other (the ratios change every round), then trade the markers back and forth along the chain until they all line up at the top.
• improve Cups gets one step harder every time you win. The shuffle now adds exactly one more swap after each correct guess, so a streak ramps up smoothly · the cups get harder to track the longer you keep up.
• improve Multitask is now a survival run. Instead of one bell and one sum, you keep both plates spinning at once: solve sums as fast as they appear and tap every bell before the next one rings. Each sum you clear tightens the tempo, so the pressure ramps until you can no longer juggle both · your score is how many you cleared.
• improve Fuller reveals across the reasoning games. Prime Time now explains a composite answer with its factorisation (12 = 2 × 2 × 3) and adds a line of history for notable numbers · perfect numbers, Mersenne primes, Fibonacci numbers, and the only even prime. Trig Drills, the facts quiz and the rest of the set give a real why on both right and wrong answers, not just the bare solution.
• improve Feeling Circle is more exact, and the long names fit. The quiz is now anchored to Plutchik's wheel with a short intro line, so a combo like "Sadness + Anger → Envy" reads as that model's answer rather than an absolute truth, and every dyad reveal gives two or three sentences on why the two feelings combine. Long emotion names (Anticipation, Apprehension) no longer overflow their badge and push the prompt off-screen · the badges grow into pills and wrap.
• improve The "I disagree · skip ahead" button lives in Settings now. The report-a-question shortcut used to sit under every quiz, right below the answer choices. It now lives in the shared Settings menu like every other game control, so the playing area stays clean · open Settings on a question to skip one you think is wrong.

Fixed

• fix Guess the Country shows the shared green win reveal. A correct guess on the standalone game used a lilac panel instead of the green success styling every other game uses · it now reads green and consistent with the rest of the catalogue.
• fix Your Rubik's Cube solves now count. Solving the freeplay cube wasn't being recorded, so the Stats panel never registered it · every genuine solve now counts as a play.
• fix Card Counting accepts a negative count. The answer box used the number-only keyboard, which hides the minus key on phones · it now uses the normal keyboard so you can type a leading "-".
• fix Pathfinder now accepts the path you memorised. The game showed you a route, then asked you to re-enter it after an invisible 90° rotation · so recreating the exact path you just memorised was marked wrong. Pathfinder is now a straight memory game: study the arrows, then play them back as you saw them.
• fix Akari puzzles are always solvable. A wall on the left or right edge could be given a clue number higher than the lights around it could ever satisfy, leaving some boards impossible to finish. Edge clues now count their neighbours correctly.
• fix Odds Guessing always has a correct answer. On a small share of rounds the right percentage could be dropped from the four choices, or two choices could both count as correct. Every round now shows exactly one correct, clearly distinct answer.
• fix Crossword clues match their squares. Four puzzles had a clue whose length or word disagreed with the actual run of squares (a word ran into its neighbour, or the clue named a different word than the grid held). All four now line up.
• fix Hash now asks the right question. The logic black-box used to show you an input and ask for its output · but you could just type that input into the probe box and read the answer straight off, so there was nothing to deduce. It now shows you a target output and asks which input produces it, so probing genuinely tests your theory of the hidden rule instead of handing you the answer.
• fix Your Pi stats now count every run. Finishing the Pi (and e, tau, primes…) digit game on its own page wasn't being recorded, so the Stats panel could sit at "Plays 1" no matter how many times you completed it. Each completed recital now counts.
• fix The Date, Time-Zone and Unit-Converter tools no longer flicker on load. The date and clock tools were drawing the server's time for a split second before snapping to yours, and the converter could briefly show the wrong category before restoring your last selection. They now settle on the correct values cleanly as the page becomes interactive.
• fix The home-page headline types again. The animated "Level up your mind" headline (and the manifesto line lower down the home page) had stopped cycling and sat frozen on the first word · the typewriter now types, erases and rolls through its words again.
• fix No more stray line under the Memory board. A thin dark line appeared beneath the cards before a game began · it was the progress bar drawn at full strength with nothing to show yet. The bar now stays hidden until you start matching and rests on a soft, faint track.

May 30, 2026

New

• new Wordle, Hangman, and Word Square now share one Word Games card. The three word puzzles are grouped under a single Word Games page · pick a tab to play the full game (nothing has been trimmed to a mini-round), and your old /wordle, /hangman, and /wordsquare links still work · they open the hub on the matching tab.
• new Register to play ad-free. Games now show a single ad slot below the play area for visitors who aren't signed in. Create a free account and it disappears · tap the × on the ad to jump straight to sign-up. Registered players never see it.

Improved

• improve Printable worksheets now cover eight more games. The worksheet generator can now build sheets for Chess Mate (a printed board diagram where you name the square the mating piece moves to, like D4), History Quiz, Ordering, Name Rarity, Proverbs (fill in the missing word), Silhouette, Where's MemPi, and Spot the Difference · the three visual games print as smaller find-it grids, and every sheet still ends with a numbered answer key.
• improve The Library menu shows every game. The header's Library dropdown was only listing the first few games in each family · it now lists all of them, with the long lists scrolling inside the panel.
• improve Pick an age, land on the worksheet. Choosing an age in the header's Worksheets menu now builds the sheet and scrolls you straight down to it, instead of leaving you at the top of the page.
• improve Consistent option menus across games. The row of option pills above each game (topic, difficulty, grid size, number of choices, and so on) now shares one look site-wide, matching the Memory game · so Color, Sequences and the rest no longer each have their own slightly different control style.

Fixed

• fix Buttons and menus respond again across the whole site. A configuration problem was stopping the site's interactive code from starting on some visits · the Sign in button, the Pi digit pad, game Start buttons, and the full-screen Game Mode toggle all rendered but ignored taps. The page now boots its interactive code on every visit, on every device.
• fix The full site footer is back on the game library. The library had been showing a stripped-down footer with no navigation and no language picker · you couldn't change language or jump to another section from the bottom of the page. It now uses the same footer as the rest of the site, so every link and the language switcher are there. The "page not found" screen gained the same footer too.
• fix Dice Roller and City Defense respond to taps again. Both games rendered but ignored clicks on Roll / Pull · they now work on first load, on every device.
• fix Hangman shows the puzzle. The word blanks and the stickman drawing were missing from the middle of the board · they're back.
• fix The Rubik's Cube is a real 3D cube again. The Rubik's page had flattened into a 2D unfolded diagram · it's back to an interactive 3D cube you rotate with the camera arrows, with every face turn animating in place and a readable "Solved!" badge.
• fix Tower of Hanoi loads again. The puzzle was showing the error card instead of the pegs and disks on first open.
• fix Labyrinth opens to the maze. The cognitive maze was rendering blank for some visitors; it now drops you straight into the board.

May 29, 2026

Improved

• improve Faster first paint on the home page. The mascot tile, the lower "manifesto" headline, and the account badge in the header now wait for the browser's first idle moment to load their interactive code instead of competing with the page render. The hero headline and copy paint as quickly as before · there's just less script in the way of it.
• improve Less layout shift in Memory and Polyglot. Emoji images now reserve their space before they finish loading, so cards and word rows no longer nudge sideways as the little pictures pop in.
• improve Analytics now wait for your consent. Google Analytics, our own usage analytics, performance metrics, and ads no longer load until you choose "Accept" on the cookie banner · and if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, we treat that as an opt-out automatically and skip the banner entirely.
• improve Keyboard play now works everywhere. The number row already answered the math-style games; it now also answers the quiz games (History Quiz, Name Rarity, Riddles and the rest) and the ordering games (Ordering, Sort 'Em Up) · press 1-9 to pick or place, then Enter or Space to continue. Every game now responds to the same keys, so you can blast through a streak without touching the mouse.
• improve Tone Knowledge instruments now sound like real instruments. Every note used to play the same plain sine "beep" no matter which surface you were on. The audio engine was rebuilt around a small synthesiser: a piano round is now a struck-string voice (stacked inharmonic partials with a fast attack and a natural decay) and a guitar round is a plucked-string voice (a bright pluck that a moving filter rounds off as the note rings). The staff stays piano-voiced. Wondrous Shannon's melodies are voiced on the same piano so the song you hear matches the keyboard you play.
• improve Audio stays clean and even during fast streaks. All game sound now runs through a shared limiter, so rapid-fire rounds (Tone Knowledge replays, Simon sequences, digit-memory playback) no longer crackle or pile up when several notes overlap. Notes also trigger the instant you press a key, scheduled straight on the audio clock so nothing waits on the main thread.
• improve Periodic Table, Leadership Timeline, and Red Day Match now scale with labyrinth level. These three quiz games previously showed the same handful of answer choices no matter how deep into the labyrinth you were · level 50 played exactly like level 5. They now add more distractor options as the level climbs (capped so the choice grid stays readable), so the polymath gauntlet keeps getting harder instead of flatlining.
• improve Sudoku Force generates instantly, even at Hard. The forced-digit solver was rebuilt on a flat bitmask board with naked-single propagation, so the Hard tier (and high-level Labyrinth runs) build a fresh uniquely-solvable grid in about 2 ms instead of up to 220 ms. Same puzzles, no more hitch between rounds during a 60-second streak.
• improve Mastermind Deduce gets genuinely harder at high difficulty. Hard rounds now draw from the full code space where colours can repeat (1296 possible codes, up from 360), so the white-peg feedback takes real deduction to untangle. Easy and Medium keep the no-repeats space.
• improve More of the site reads in your language. The About and FAQ sections on the most recently added games, the in-game Learn pages, and thousands of geography guides covering cities, mountains, rivers and lakes are now available across all 25 languages.

New

• new Your level, on one calm bar. The My progress page now opens with The Path · a single overall level that grows as you play, with a milestone ladder and an honest "X rounds to the next level" so you always see how close the next rung is. It only ever goes up · taking a break never costs you anything, and there are no popups · it waits for you on the page. Translated into all 25 languages.
• new Cookie controls in the footer. A new Cookie Policy page, a Cookie Settings link to change your choice at any time, and a Do Not Sell or Share My Info page for your CCPA privacy rights.
• new Report a bug or send feedback from any page. A discrete button now sits next to the Game Mode toggle (and in its spot elsewhere). Tap it and we capture a snapshot of your current view · your email is masked out before the snapshot is taken · so you can show us exactly what you saw and add a note. It goes straight to the development team.

May 28, 2026

Improved

• improve Periodic Table game now shows a compact periodic table below the question. The element you're being asked about is removed from its spot, so you can also learn where it sits in the table - not just its symbol or name.

Fixed

• fix Emdashes removed from player-facing strings. Game descriptions, translated UI strings, fact-frame sentences, and game-component messages across Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Bengali, Indonesian, and other locales contained emdashes (the "--" dash character) in violation of the site-wide content rule. All replaced with hyphens or middots. Affected files: game catalog description for Trig Drills, i18n/games.ts locale overrides, i18n/ui.ts translated strings, i18n/components for Crocodile, Cups, Circle Puzzle, Euler's Identity, Memorise, Whack-a-Mole, Historical Events, page-meta locale JSON files, game-faqs copy for Akari and Hashiwokakero, geo-seo Russian heading, and worksheet registry reason text in several game manifests. Generated platform snapshots regenerated from fixed sources.

New

• new Who Made This? at /whomade · whopainted, whowrote, and whocomposed merged into one creator-recognition game. A top-of-page filter picks Art, Literature, or Music; all three modes share the same QuizMini engine. Old URLs (/whopainted, /whowrote, /whocomposed) redirect.
• new Did You Know? at /didyouknow · usefulfact, funfact, and butwhy merged into one fill-in-the-blank trivia game. Filter tabs for Useful Facts, Fun Facts, and How It Works. Old URLs redirect.
• new Estimation at /estimation · crazy-comparisons, estimation-engine, and volume-estimate merged into one estimation game. Filter tabs for Comparisons, Products, and Volumes. Old URLs redirect.
• new Spatial Reasoning at /spatial-reasoning · spatial, fold-out, and shadow-cast merged into one spatial game. Filter tabs for Rotation, Nets, and Shadows. Old URLs redirect.
• new Follow the Chain at /circuit-breaker · gear-train and circuit-breaker merged into one cause-and-effect game. Filter tabs for Gears and Circuits. Old URLs redirect.
• new Logic Puzzles at /logic-puzzles · akari, shikaku, nurikabe, slitherlink, hashiwokakero, and infinityloop merged into one hub. Filter tabs for each puzzle type. Old URLs redirect.
• new Pattern Recognition at /patterns · matrix, odd-one-out, and rule-induction merged into one pattern game. Filter tabs for Matrix, Odd One Out, and Rule Induction. Old URLs redirect.
• new Finance Lab expanded · compound interest and probability topics added alongside the existing candlestick, Greeks, and valuation modes.
• new History Quiz at /history · When Did, Who Did, and He Did What?! merged into one surface. Three question modes on the same historical dataset: pick the year an event happened, who was responsible, or which deed belongs to a given person and year. Enable any combination of modes via the chip picker on the idle panel. Old URLs (/whendid, /whodid, /he-did-what) redirect.
• new Finance Lab at /finance · candlestick patterns, options Greeks, and stock valuation in one place with a top-of-page topic filter. Pick all three for the full gauntlet, or drill one topic at a time.
• new Ordering at /ordering · historical events by date, planets and animals by size, and rank-by-numeric-property in one place with the same topic-filter chips. One streak across whichever topics you enable.
• new Music Lab at /music · ear-training random tone sequences and famous-melody segment learning, picked via a mode toggle at the top of the page. Each mode keeps its own high streak.
• new Unit Converter moved into the Tools section. /convert is now a dedicated converter without the quiz half · type a value, pick the units, the conversion appears instantly.
• new "18+" age tier on the By-age dropdown. The dropdown stopped at 15-18 before; an adult who wanted "every game, tuned hard" had to fall through to the full Library. There is now an explicit 18+ tier that surfaces every catalogued game (tools and meta-hubs included) at peak difficulty + level, on the same dropdown as the children's tiers.

Improved

• improve Sudoku worksheets now print the real puzzle. Sudoku Force is back in the worksheet generator: each problem prints the actual 9×9 grid in its exact state · givens filled, one cell marked, and you pick the digit that must go there. The printed sheet is the same deduction as the live game, with an answer key on the last page.
• improve Every round now tells you what happened · not just "Not quite." The cognitive games (Card Count, Multi-Tasker, Prime Time, Gear Train and the rest) used to end a round with a bare "Correct!" or "Not quite." with no detail. They now show the correct answer, what you picked, and the working behind it (the running card total, the bell catch, the exact product) on wins and misses alike · translated across all 25 languages.
• improve The newest games now look like the rest of the site. Those games shipped with their own red feedback bar and off-palette buttons. They now use the same result panel, mascot, colours, and Continue button as every other game, so the whole catalogue feels like one product.
• improve Card Count has Easy / Medium / Hard. The game flashed cards at a fixed fast tempo that was punishing from the first round. You can now pick a difficulty: Easy deals 4 cards of ±1 at a readable pace, Hard ramps to 9 cards of ±3 at speed. Each level is age-graded so the gentle version is offered to younger players and the brutal one to teens.
• improve Labyrinth is cleaner. The maze now auto-saves your spot silently, so the save-code chip you had to copy is gone, and the little mascot that sat in the board's top-right corner has been removed. Refresh the page and you pick up exactly where you left off.
• improve Pathfinder has Easy / Medium / Hard. The path was long and the look-time fixed, so it played far too hard. You can now pick a difficulty, paths are shorter, and you get more time to memorise longer ones. Each level is age-graded.
• fix Every game's Start button is readable. The big Start button used each game's pastel accent with white text, which on light themes (like lilac) was nearly invisible. It now uses the standard high-contrast button on every game, so the call-to-action looks the same site-wide.
• improve Hangman keyboard · on-screen QWERTY keys now resize to fit any screen width without overflowing; wrong/correct key colors align with other word games (grey for guessed-wrong, green for guessed-right). Physical keyboard typing was already supported but is now more reliable across all focus states. Wrong-guess counter turns red instead of pink.
• improve Word Square · PARENTING grid · added "parent", "parting", and "repaint" to the accepted word list. All three are buildable from the grid letters and are common enough that players should not be surprised to find them rejected.

Fixed

• fix Quiz games stop re-asking a question you just saw. Games that draw from a fixed pool of questions · Proverbs, Fun Facts, Useful Facts, Eras, Periodic Table, Heads of State, Which Philosophy, Mosaic, and the Who Painted / Who Composed / Who Wrote recognisers · could repeat a question within three or four rounds. Two things were quietly defeating the built-in "don't repeat until the pool is exhausted" guarantee: each round's identity included its random seed (so every round looked brand-new to the de-duplicator), and the streak loop was wiping its memory on every win as the difficulty ramped. Both are fixed · each of these games now walks through its whole pool before any question can come back.
• fix Wordle input now works reliably. Clicking anywhere on the game immediately enables typing. The next empty tile is now white with a blinking cursor so it is clear where the next letter will land.
• fix Emailed worksheets keep the exact layout you chose. "Email worksheet to me" now sends a short cover note with the worksheet as an attachment, instead of dumping it inline where email clients stripped the styling and collapsed your two-column sheet into one mangled column. Open the attached file and it renders in the precise layout you picked, ready for Print · Save as PDF. The "Email worksheet to me" button also shows a sending spinner and a 20-second cooldown so a slow send can't be double-fired.
• fix Worksheet "Save as PDF" button no longer surprises you. The button is now labelled "Print / Save as PDF" because it opens the browser's print dialog (where you pick Save as PDF) rather than saving a PDF directly · the old label promised a one-click PDF download and broke that promise on every click. Now translated into all 25 locales.
• fix Pricing and sign-in copy refreshed. The pricing page and sign-in modal now focus on what the catalogue and your account give you, and the copy reads correctly across all 25 locales.
• fix Sign-in modal headline matches the button that opened it. Tapping "Sign in" in the header used to open a modal headlined "Save your streak" with sign-up value props · the wrong context for returning users. The modal now reads "Sign in" when opened from the header, "Save your streak" only when reached from explicit sign-up entry points.
• fix Sign-out really cleans up after you on shared devices. The sign-out flow used to drop the server session but leave round history, badge state, favourites, and the engagement cache in localStorage · the next person to use the phone or kiosk could read it all. Now sign-out also clears the per-user keys (round buffers, seen-badges, favourites, /me sort preference) while leaving device-level settings like sound and language alone.
• fix Consent banner now lets you reject as easily as accept. The banner shipped with only an "Accept" button and a "Manage" link that navigated to the policy page · the privacy policy promised "you can opt out of non-essential analytics via the consent banner" but there was no way to. There's now a "No thanks" button next to "OK"; both are translated into all 25 locales.
• fix Sign-up perks list speaks your language. The four-bullet "what an account unlocks" list inside the sign-in modal was hardcoded English in every locale. It now reads in the page's locale and describes what an account unlocks (sync, leaderboard, badges, and offline play).
• fix Sound toggle reads in your language. The "Sound: On" / "Sound: Off" pill in every game's settings panel was rendering in English on Swedish, French, Arabic, Korean and every other locale. Now uses translated strings everywhere.
• fix Privacy policy mentions the self-service delete button. The text still told visitors to "request deletion by emailing hello@playmemorize.com" even though /me has had a working Delete-account button for months. The policy now points at the button (and keeps the email address as a fallback).
• fix Crash screens read in your language. The full-page error boundary ("Something went wrong"), the per-game island boundary ("This game hit a snag"), and the 404 page ("Page not found") all rendered English on every locale · the very moment users most need clear text. All three now translate via 25-locale UI keys.
• fix Account-service retry button reads in your language. When the account API briefly 5xx'd, the header showed a ⟳ Retry button with an English title and aria-label on every locale · now uses translated copy.
• fix Quiz games no longer show contradictory verdicts on fast double-clicks. When a player tapped two answer choices in the same frame, the second tap could overwrite the displayed "your answer" while the underlying win/lose verdict was locked to the first tap · so the reveal said "you picked B" and "✓" (because A was correct) at the same time. The chosen answer is now locked the moment the verdict is, matching the verdict-latching shared lifecycle hook does for the phase.
• fix "Adults / all challenges" worksheet button matches the 18+ age button. The button hardcoded difficulty: 8 and skipped every per-game param override · so it generated a strictly weaker worksheet than the new 18+ age tier right next to it (which uses the documented adult tuning · difficulty 10 plus per-band caps like Math's hardest number range). The button now delegates to the 18+ preset so the two adult entry points produce identical worksheets.
• fix Stock Valuation stops calling 10x vs 9x "Fairly Valued". Analysts call a 10% premium "in line"; players don't · seeing two different numbers labelled "fair" reads as a bug. The engine now requires the displayed integers to actually be equal for the "fair" verdict to fire, and tightens the under/over bands so they always show a real gap. The reveal also now explains why · e.g. "Brightline Mobility trades at 11x, 2x above the 9x peer-group benchmark · investors pay more per unit of value than for its peers, so it looks overvalued on EV/EBITDA".
• fix Changelog page builds again. An unescaped {'{name}'} token in a recent entry was being parsed by Astro as a JSX expression instead of literal text, crashing the build at the changelog page and aborting every page after it.

Improved

• improve Proverbs has more, and more authentic, sayings. Each language's pool grew from 9 to 15, and the new ones are genuine native proverbs rather than translations of the English set: Swedish gets "Borta bra men hemma bäst" and "Många bäckar små gör en stor å", Japanese "猿も木から落ちる", Arabic "الصبر مفتاح الفرج", and so on across all 25 languages, each with its meaning explained in that language. Two old entries that accidentally showed the answer inside the sentence (Hindi and Thai "better late than never") were also fixed.
• improve Volume Estimate now draws the boxes. The three containers used to be plain text dimensions ("7 × 7 × 6"); you can now see each one as an isometric 3D box. The boxes share one scale across the round, so the largest volume really does look the biggest · the projection is parallel (no perspective foreshortening), which keeps the visual comparison honest. Each answer is colour-coded (peach / blue / lilac), and the exact volume is revealed under every box once you pick.
• improve MemPi can no longer hop outside its box. The bouncing mascot on the home page could occasionally leap outside its little cream panel; it now stays neatly inside it.
• improve Wordle reveals its row. Submitting a guess now flips each tile in sequence (80ms stagger, 360ms each), matching the mainline Wordle's "row tells you what just happened" feel. Honours prefers-reduced-motion.
• improve Memory cards turn properly. The labyrinth memory cards no longer hard-swap their background · they rotate 180° on the Y axis with two backface-hidden faces, and a matched pair pulses briefly. The "canonical memory feel" that older players were missing.
• improve Bigger keys on small phones. Wordle and Hangman on-screen keys are now 44px tall (Apple HIG / WCAG 2.5.5 touch-target minimum) · they used to sit just under the line at 40-42px on mobile.
• improve Keyboard players can see where they are. Hanoi pegs and Whack-a-Mole holes now show a brand-coloured focus ring · transparent SVG rects and dark backgrounds were swallowing the default browser ring, so keyboard players had no signal which element was focused.
• improve Word Square stops congratulating you for duplicates. Re-submitting a word you already found used to flash a green "info" toast that read like a win. It's now a neutral blue note.

Fixed

• fix Hashiwokakero now rejects crossing bridges. The win check verified bridge counts and connectivity but didn't enforce the canonical no-crossing rule. That rule is now enforced, so it can't quietly come back.
• fix Polyglot can't show two identical emoji buttons. Two distinct words sharing the same emoji (e.g. cat / kitten both → 🐈) used to slip past the dedupe filter. The dedup logic is now in a tested helper (buildPolyglotChoices).
• fix Chess Mate accepts mate-by-promotion. A pawn reaching its last rank now auto-promotes to queen in both the mate verdict and the reveal board · the dataset includes mate-in-1 puzzles that needed promotion and were being silently mis-graded.
• fix Compound Interest never ships an unanswerable round. When two options happened to tie at the same final value, the unique-max guarantee was bumping the wrong option. The fix bumps the actually-tied option (and falls back to maxing its rate if needed).
• fix Circuit Breaker grades behaviour, not the gate id. The prompt reads "pick the gate so OUTPUT equals TARGET", but the verdict checked which gate was picked. When the two inputs were equal, multiple gates yielded the target · the player satisfied the visible condition and got marked wrong. Now grades output === target.
• fix Eras stops asking you to distinguish "Romantic" from "Romanticism". The painting catalog had four near-identical era slugs (romantic, romanticism, romantic-opera, classical-romantic) that all rendered as separate buttons. Collapsed into a single romanticism; same treatment for renaissance-literature → renaissance. A regression test keeps the retired slugs out for good.
• fix Poker odds are correct. Pair successCount was 352 (didn't match any poker hand); straight-flush shipped with the royal-flush math under a normalised denominator. Both corrected to canonical 5-card poker combinatorics, pinned by tests that cross-check the displayed "1 in N" against the derived ratio.
• fix Heads of State date fixes. Tokugawa Ieyasu now ends in 1616 (he ruled as Ōgosho through his death; the previous 1605 was the formal Shogun retirement); Lula's first two terms end 2010, not 2011. Pinned by regression tests.
• fix No more duplicate paintings or musical works. Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Botticelli's Birth of Venus each shipped under two different ids with conflicting metadata · removed. Beethoven's 9th Symphony was in the events list twice. A dataset hygiene test now catches duplicate ids.
• fix Title translations cleaned up. Raft of the Medusa had Chinese-character mojibake in its Arabic and Thai titles. Star-Spangled Banner had broken renderings in Swedish, Dutch and Polish, AND was mis-categorised as a composition · Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics, the melody is John Stafford Smith. Mozart's Requiem had a meaningless Arabic title, a Hindi title that translated to "Protection Music", and a Thai title that meant "Haunting-ghost song for the deceased". Nighthawks was being literally translated to bird species across most locales (Hopper's title is slang for nocturnal humans, not the bird).
• fix Korean and Bengali proverbs no longer reveal the answer. The "actions speak louder than words" entry in both locales had the word above the blank visible in the prompt above the blank. Reframed to the "one action is better than a hundred words" variant where the answer doesn't appear in the prompt.
• fix Czech proverbs · "grass-is-greener" stops meaning the opposite. The slot held "Všude dobře, doma nejlíp" ("no place like home"), which inverts the intended concept. Replaced with the correct Czech rendering.
• fix Which Philosophy stops calling Nietzsche a nihilist. Nietzsche diagnosed nihilism as a threat to overcome, not a doctrine to embrace. The entry's philosophy label was changed from "Nihilism" to "Death of God" (the actual theme of the famous quote), with an explanation that flags the distinction.
• fix Catch the Cat is actually winnable now. The board was radius 3 (cat reaches the edge in 3 steps, faster than any wall can be built) and pre-block density was 4-13%, which a solver simulation showed was effectively unwinnable at every difficulty. The board is now radius 4-6 with 20-36% density, spanning a real easy / medium / hard spectrum. A regression test plays each difficulty with a greedy bot (a lower bound on human skill) and asserts real win floors so the unwinnable params can't quietly come back.

New

• new Heavy Friction · the city now stops when you leave. The idle game lived up to its title only halfway · resources still ticked while the tab was hidden. They no longer do. The city only advances while you're actively here, or while a hired Admin is on shift (each hire grants 30 minutes of background coverage). When you come back to find your Admin shift expired, the world plays a short comedic "rebuilding" cinematic · pieces tumble back onto the map, status messages cycle ("Catching a fleeing goat…", "Convincing the farmer to return from the pub…", "Reissuing tax forms · the originals dissolved…") and the footnote reminds you that nothing actually progressed while you were away. The first 30 seconds after a tab-switch are always free, and the first 5 minutes of Admin coverage are granted automatically so an honest tab-flip never costs anything.

Improved

• improve Heavy Friction · defending a wave now restocks Admin coverage. A player who fights well but is broke used to deadlock against the rebuild loop · no money to hire Admins, no Admins to skip the rebuild. Each defended wave now grants a free minute of coverage on top of the cash bounty, so combat keeps you in the game even when the treasury is empty. The wave event log shows both rewards together.
• improve Heavy Friction · Admin coverage HUD warns before it runs out. The coverage row was previously binary · "5m 0s" or "No coverage". It now slides through a low-coverage state (warm butter background, soft pulse) when under a minute, so you have time to defend a wave or hire before the next rebuild. The meta text changes with it: "spent while tab is closed" → "topping up · defend a wave or hire" → "city falls apart while you're away". The footer also tallies how many times you've been rebuilt · 🚧 Rebuilt 7×.
• improve Heavy Friction · the rebuild cinematic has more visual life. The card now wears a hazard-tape stripe at the top, the stage has a faint ground hatch, eight building icons tumble in with staggered timing and each one kicks up a dust puff as it lands, and a tiny hammer swings in the corner while the work proceeds. The cycling messages also feed an aria-live region so screen-reader users hear the same beats. Every motion layer respects prefers-reduced-motion: the pieces, dust, hammer, fades and pulses all settle into static layouts when the OS opts out.
• improve Heavy Friction · Escape closes the rebuild card. The Skip button now also reads "Skip (Esc)" and auto-focuses when the cinematic opens, so a keyboard user can dismiss in one keystroke instead of tabbing through. Tabbing during the rebuild stays on the dismiss button.
• improve Heavy Friction · event log shows when Admins saved you. Resume after a long absence with coverage to spare and the event log now records "📋 Admin held the fort for 12m · 18m coverage left", so the hires you made stop feeling like a hidden state delta and start feeling like staff you can see working.
• improve Blog articles open with a clear TLDR box. Every blog article now starts with a green summary box (two to four sentences) so you can quickly decide whether to read on. The summaries are accurate extracts of the full article and are translated across all 25 locales. Estimated reading times were also corrected to match the actual word count at 200 words per minute.

May 27, 2026

Improved

• improve Every emoji in every box is sized to fit. Game-tile badges on the home page and library now render through the shared Twemoji component at 75% of the tile box, instead of relying on the OS emoji font that left some glyphs visibly smaller than others. The same rule was applied to badge-grid icons, the streak flame, the Memory fallback layer, Major-system pair strips, every game's "you finished" reveal, and the periodic-table element card. The library dropdown game-icons were also nudged up to match.
• improve MemPi lands where he jumps to, even on resize. The strolling MemPi on the manifesto rail used to capture his hop coordinates in pixels at takeoff, so if web fonts or the typewriter line reflowed the rail mid-jump, he'd land in the pre-resize spot before snapping. The hop now recomputes the rail position every frame and scales the arc height with the rail itself, so he always touches down inside the box.
• improve Site footer reads as a passion project. The footer copyright line dropped the "free brain gym, built in Stockholm" tagline in favour of "© 2026 · A passion project from Christoffer De Geer." in every one of the 25 locales. The library footer reverts to "Hand-built by Christoffer De Geer."
• improve One Settings menu per game, not two. Every game page already shows the canonical Settings / Stats / FAQ panel below the round chrome (rendered once from the shared landing layout). About 20 games were also rendering a second per-game settings collapsible that duplicated the same Sound toggle. The duplicate is gone everywhere; per-game knobs (Simon speed, Convert category, Geo "Study" link, Crazy Comparisons stop) now sit inline next to the round chrome as their own quiet utility row.
• improve By-age dropdown 15-18 now means "every game". The top age band always included games down to 4-7, but creator tools and meta hubs (Dice, Emoji Text, Faktageneratorn, Polymath, Heavy Friction, All) carried no age tag at all and stayed hidden from every band. They now show up at 15-18, so an 18-year-old finds the full library where they expect it.
• improve Emotions game mixes both directions from the first round. The game has two complementary tasks ·pick the two primary emotions that combine to form a complex one, and pick the complex emotion that comes from a given pair. They used to be gated separately by difficulty (one alone at d ≤ 3, both at d ≤ 6, intensity ladder at d > 6); now both combo directions mix at every difficulty so the brain practises the relationship both ways from the start.
• improve Localised game names now cover the puzzle catalogue. Hanoi, Infinity Loop, Akari, Shikaku, Nurikabe, Slitherlink, Hashiwokakero and Emotions previously fell back to English on every non-Swedish locale's home page tile and header dropdown. They now ship native labels and one-line descriptions across all 25 locales (Swedish is now at full 103/103 coverage; the other 24 locales gained 8 entries each ·see src/i18n/games.ts).
• improve Ordering-game emoji glyphs use Twemoji. Order Em Up's and Sort Em Up's per-card emoji used to render via the OS emoji font, which made some cells visibly larger than others (Apple vs Twemoji renders the same character at different cap heights). They now render through the shared <Emoji> component, so every card carries an identically-sized Twemoji SVG.
• improve Leaderboard "You" row hydrates from the cloud before painting. Signed-in players who landed on the Leaderboard directly (e.g. from the footer) sometimes saw themselves with 0 rounds because the row was built from whatever was already cached in localStorage ·sparse or empty on a recently-signed-in browser. The component now also pulls the cloud history first, so the You row reflects the full account.
• improve Chess Mate plays from a 9,796-puzzle bench. The mate-in-one pool grew from a handful of curated positions to nearly ten thousand, so you can play hundreds of rounds before a position repeats. Difficulty ramps with level: easier mating patterns up front, busier middlegame mates further in.
• improve Riddles got 105 prompts in English (×25 languages). The Riddles pool expanded across classic, wordplay, math and lateral-thinking categories. Each riddle now ships with a one-paragraph explanation so the "why" lands even when you guessed wrong.
• improve Which Philosophy now spans 67 statements. The famous-quote / pick-the-philosophy pool more than doubled - Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Confucius, contemporary names - across ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, philosophy of mind.
• improve Three more history events. When Did, Who Did, He Did What, and Order When now include Hamlet (1609), Newton's Principia (1687), and Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) - the actors were already in the pool, the events themselves were not.
• improve Infinity Loop rounds are tighter. Pipe-loop generator widened its solvable position space, so two rounds at the same difficulty no longer feel like the same board with a few rotations.

Fixed

• fix Polymath now plays the same round on the same seed. A non-determinism bug let the same seed produce different challenges across runs, which broke fair head-to-head scores in labyrinth and replay-from-history. Polymath's generator is now strictly deterministic in line with every other module.
• fix No more duplicate riddles in a session. The Riddles pool had a handful of entries with identical answers and near-identical wording sitting under different IDs, so the same puzzle could appear twice in a single sitting. Removed the duplicates and tightened the data check so this can't slip back in.
• fix Who Painted / Who Wrote / Who Composed never repeat a creator in the choices. When two artworks by the same artist (e.g. two Botticellis) ended up as a target + distractor, the player saw two buttons labelled "Sandro Botticelli" with no way to tell them apart. Distractors are now deduplicated by creator so every choice shows a distinct name.
• fix Periodic Table no longer leaks the answer. The element card was showing the atomic number on every round; in "atomic number → symbol" mode that's part of the prompt, but in the other two modes a quick glance at the corner gave the answer away. The number now appears only when the prompt actually asks for it.
• fix Tower of Hanoi gives you room to think. The move budget was set to the exact theoretical minimum (2^n − 1), so a single fumbled move lost the round. Players now get a difficulty-aware margin that shrinks as their level rises.
• fix Proverbs · no more duplicate-word choices. In Spanish, Dutch and Japanese a handful of proverbs share the same blank-word ("oro", "goud", "金"), so two buttons could show the same answer. The distractor pool now deduplicates by the rendered label so every choice is visually distinct.
• fix Red Day never freezes the tab. Picking the "buddhist" religion filter (only 3 holidays in the dataset) sent the choice loop spinning forever trying to find a fourth unique date. The round now adapts to small pools and ships ≤ pool size choices instead of hanging.
• fix Odd One Out · "vehicles" and "insects" are no longer ambiguous. The vehicles group was "road vehicles" but the odd pool included other vehicles (plane, train, boat). The insects group included spiders and scorpions, which are arachnids. Both categories are now tightened so the "odd" item is unambiguously the wrong fit.
• fix Whack-a-Mole resolves the moment you hit the target. Previously a clear run made you wait out the rest of the timer before the round ended. It now snaps to "You won" the instant you reach the score target.
• fix Color sequences keep growing past level 13. The mini-game capped the sequence at 16 colours even though the schema allowed 50, so high-streak runs plateaued. The cap now matches the schema.
• fix Mastermind Deduce rounds always have a unique answer. Earlier rounds could stop with multiple codes still consistent with the feedback shown, so a deducing player legitimately picked a code that wasn't graded as the answer. The generator now keeps adding discriminating guesses until exactly one solution remains, and distractors are drawn from outside the survivor set.
• fix Schedule Conflict no longer has two valid answers. When the puzzle picked the latest time slot (15:30), one of the time constraints fell back to a narrative phrase that didn't actually ban any specific time, leaving a second slot logically valid. The target time is now restricted to the interior of the day so every round resolves to one answer.
• fix Shadow Cast shows the light source. The "pick the shadow" round used the same static block glyph regardless of seed, so the player couldn't actually use any visual reasoning. A sun glyph now sits in the corner that matches the round's light direction.
• fix Player-facing strings in Candlestick, Greeks, Valuation, Which Philosophy, Heads of State, Country and Odds now flow through the translation layer. These games previously hardcoded English prompts and labels in JSX; they now resolve through useTranslations(lang).
• fix Historical events dataset no longer has duplicate IDs. Three events (Hamlet, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin) were entered twice in the events list, which broke the integrity test and could surface the same actor twice in Who Did rounds.
• fix Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring + Botticelli's Birth of Venus appear once. Both paintings shipped under two different ids in the catalogue, so Who Painted and Eras quiz rounds could show the same painting twice in one choice grid (and Girl with a Pearl Earring was classified as both 'baroque' and 'dutch-golden-age' depending on which copy the round picked).
• fix Beethoven's 9th Symphony appears once in history rounds. The event was listed twice (beethoven-ninth and beethoven-9th), so When Did / Order When pools could show "Ninth Symphony premiered" and "9th Symphony premieres" as separate distractors for the same year.
• fix Poker pair odds are now correct. The "what are the odds of a pair in 5-card poker" round shipped with the wrong success count (352 instead of 1,098,240), so the percentage option the player was supposed to pick didn't match the explainer text "1 in 2.37".
• fix Sun Yat-sen is named correctly in Swedish. The Heads of State dataset had translated the surname as "Sol Yat-sen" · a machine translation of "Sun" as the Swedish word for the sun.
• fix Name Rarity replaces four fictional / placeholder entries. The data sheet for Luke, Logan, Layla and Luna pointed at Star Wars / X-Men / Harry Potter / a song; Mateo had a "(sic)" debug note in the player-visible row. All five now name a real public figure (Luke Bryan, Logan Paul, Layla Moran, Luna Mijović, Mateo Kovačić).
• fix Hashiwokakero, Slitherlink, Nurikabe and Hanoi prompts now translate. The four puzzles shipped a hardcoded English prompt/won/lost trio inside the MiniGame, so every non-English locale fell back to English text. They now read through useTranslations(lang).
• fix Akari translates its bulb / lit / empty cell labels. Screen-reader users on Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Indonesian, Hebrew and Thai now hear native words instead of English "bulb / lit / empty". Removed six locale entries that weren't part of the active 25 locales.
• fix Bubble Wrap timing is robust to clock changes. The win/loss check measured elapsed time with Date.now(), which follows wall-clock time and can flip the outcome if the system clock jumps mid-round (NTP sync, manual change). Switched to performance.now().
• fix Tower of Hanoi pegs are keyboard-accessible. Pegs had a click handler but no keyboard support, so a tab-traversing player couldn't select or move disks. Added focus + Enter/Space handlers.
• fix Polyglot / Odd One Out / Ghost emoji choices announce themselves. The three games' choice buttons rendered only the emoji glyph (decorative), so screen readers said nothing useful when focused. Each button now carries the emoji as an aria-label.
• fix Stale riddle id renamed. The "cl-cloud" riddle id pointed at a riddle whose answer is "A joke" · the id had stuck around when the riddle content changed. Renamed to "cl-joke".
• fix Eras game no longer asks you to distinguish "Romantic" from "Romanticism". The painting catalog had four near-identical era slugs (romantic, romanticism, romantic-opera, classical-romantic) and Eras built its distractor pool from the slug list. Picking the right one was often impossible because two or three buttons read as the same era. Collapsed into a single romanticism slug (per-locale titles preserved). Same treatment for renaissance-literature → renaissance.
• fix Straight Flush odds are now right. The "what are the odds of a straight flush?" round shipped with the royal-flush success count (4) under a normalised 649,740 denominator. The picker grid and the explainer disagreed. Corrected to 36 / 2,598,960 = 1 in 72,193.
• fix Tokugawa Ieyasu's reign spans his full Ōgosho years (1603-1616). The Heads of State dataset stopped his entry at 1605, the year he formally retired the Shogun title to his son · but he held actual power until his death in 1616. The 1603-1605 range confused anyone who knows him as the founder of the 250-year Tokugawa shogunate.
• fix Lula's first term ended in 2010, not 2011. Heads of State endYear corrected · his second presidency ended 31 December 2010.
• fix Compound Interest puzzle is no longer unanswerable. When two of the three options happened to tie at the same final value, the unique-max guarantee bumped the wrong option · the tie remained and the round had no correct answer. The fix now bumps the actually-tied option and falls back to maxing its rate if the year extension still doesn't strictly dominate.
• fix Schedule Conflict, Periodic Table, Candlestick, Valuation, Greeks, Odd One Out, Sudoku Force, Mastermind Deduce, Chess Mate, Finn Femfel, Crazy Comparisons and Minesweeper Flag now run in 25 languages. A pass through every `i18n-pending` marker in src/games/. Schedule Conflict's five-person constraints, day names, Periodic Table's "Symbol for {'{name}'}?" prompts, Candlestick's pattern labels (Hammer / Doji / ...), Valuation's verdict labels, Greeks' descriptions, Odd One Out's category reveal, Sudoku Force's explainer, Mastermind Deduce's colour-name screen-reader labels, Chess Mate's piece names + selection announcement, Finn Femfel's per-cell announcements, and Minesweeper Flag's mines-remaining label all now flow through `useTranslations(lang)`.
• fix Crossword auto-advances and obeys arrow keys. Typing a letter now jumps to the next cell, Backspace on an empty cell jumps back, Arrow keys navigate, and the first non-blocked cell takes focus on mount. Mobile play used to require a tap per letter.
• fix Typing can't be paste-cheated. A single input event that grows the value by more than 5 characters is rejected · pasting the full prompt no longer counts as a finish.
• fix Wordle and Hangman keyboard handlers stop at editable focus. The global keydown listener used to fire letter guesses while focus sat in any input on the same page. It now bails when e.target is an input / textarea / select / contenteditable element.
• fix Hash double-submit guard. A rapid Enter + click could submit the same Hash round twice and bump the streak by two. Guarded.
• fix Red Day focus moves to "Next round" after picking. The just-pressed answer button kept focus while it was disabled, leaving the focus ring on a non-interactive control until the player tapped again.
• fix Polyglot, Akari, Circle Puzzle and Catch the Cat are keyboard-playable. The SVG cells / rings / hexes had click handlers but no tabIndex or onKeyDown · a tab-traversing player could not interact. Added Enter/Space activation and focus management. (Hanoi and Infinity Loop got the same treatment in an earlier pass.)
• fix Polyglot no longer offers two visually identical emoji buttons. Two distinct words sharing the same emoji (e.g. cat / kitten both → 🐈) used to slip past the dedupe filter, leaving the player to guess between two buttons that looked the same. Now deduped on the rendered glyph.
• fix Tones / Wondrous Shannon highlight timer is round-safe. The 180ms highlight-clear setTimeout wasn't tracked, so a round re-key during the window fired setHi against torn-down state. Now tracked in playTimersRef and cancelled on cleanup.
• fix Mosaic / Scratch Card / Where's MemPi reset on seed change. The three games relied on the host remounting via {`key={seed}`} to clear their firedRef + per-round state. Reused hosts (e.g. polymath cycling) carried stale "round already fired" flags into the next round, making it unresolvable. Added defensive seed-reset effects.
• fix Tomato-origin fact is no longer subtly wrong. The frame asked "Tomatoes were first cultivated in {0}" with answer "South America", but tomatoes were first cultivated in Mesoamerica · only their wild origin is South American. Reworded to "Tomatoes originally grew wild in {0}" across all 25 locales.
• fix Multi-Tasker space-to-catch is round-safe. The Space keydown listener used to bypass the resolved state and could re-toggle the bell visual after the round was already scored. It also re-registered on every animation frame during the 2.6s descent. Now reads via refs (no re-register) and bails when the round has resolved.
• fix Circuit Breaker now grades the behaviour, not the gate id. The prompt reads "Pick the gate so OUTPUT equals TARGET" but the verdict checked which gate was picked. When the two inputs happen to be equal, every gate produces the same boolean · the player satisfied the visible condition and still got marked wrong. Now grades on whether OUTPUT actually equals TARGET.
• fix Hashiwokakero rejects crossing bridges. The win check verified bridge counts and connectivity but didn't enforce the canonical no-crossing rule, so a player could "solve" any board with crossing bridges even when the generator's intended solution had none.
• fix Chess Mate handles pawn promotion. Mate-by-promotion puzzles (a7-a8=Q#) were either falsely rejected (the engine kept the pawn as a pawn for the mate check) or falsely accepted (mate without the queen's attack pattern). Pawns reaching the last rank now auto-promote to queen in both the verdict and the reveal board.
• fix Convert keeps decoy values integer. The decoy generator used `factor/10` which produced 2.4 for factor=24 (day → hours), displaying a non-integer next to integer answer options · a visual tell that revealed the wrong answer.
• fix Analogies always shows four buttons. When a relation pool was pathologically thin (one item after the p1 filter), the fallback shipped a single-button choice list · trivially correct but breaking streak meaning. Now pads with three distinct b-values from other relations.

May 26, 2026

New

• new 16 new cognitive games. Fold-Out, Pathfinder, Shadow Cast, Mirror Symmetry, Volume Estimate, Circuit Breaker, Gear Train, Rule Induction, Schedule Conflict, Laser Bounce, Multi-Tasker, Card Count, Prime Time, Fractions Faster, Estimation Engine, and Compound Interest. Short rounds, age-aware difficulty, full GameModule conformance.
• new Email a worksheet to yourself. The worksheet generator now has an “Email to me” button that sends the HTML to your account email. Requires sign-in with a verified address.

Improved

• improve Simpler header. The three menu items are now Library, By age, and Worksheets · each opens with a click on its own label. By topic was retired; the same browse-by-skill flow now lives inside the Library dropdown.
• improve Worksheets in your language. The generated worksheet, the per-game labels, and the “N problems / N games” chrome now follow the active site language end to end. The page no longer ships English copy on a translated locale.
• improve Worksheets look like worksheets. Stronger borders, hard shadows, monospace numbers, tinted FAQ cards · a sheet a teacher would put on a classroom wall.
• improve Activity board: recent only. Your activity heatmap now shows 7 days for new accounts and 30 days from there on, instead of a sparse year-long grid.
• improve Younger-friendly age coverage. Odd One Out and Backwards moved into the 4–7 band so the youngest filter has more to play.
• improve Bigger emoji on game cards. Home-page game tiles now show the emoji 50% larger and vertically centred with the title block.
• improve Thicker writing cursor. The hero typewriter cursor on the front page is now 7px wide so the “mid-sentence” rhythm reads from a distance.
• improve Calmer mascot bubbles. The green/blue/yellow bubbles around MemPi drift on a slow 22–26 second cycle instead of darting.
• improve Game-mode sits at the top. Entering full-screen game mode now snaps the game to the top of the viewport rather than leaving the old header gap behind.
• improve Passion-project framing. The home page manifesto, the library footer, and the per-game About copy now lead with “A passion project from Christoffer De Geer” and explicitly describe what is stored, what is exportable, and what you can ask to be deleted.

Fixed

• fix Lucktexten / Minnesluckan no longer leak into English. The two Swedish breadcrumb names were appearing as the English-locale About heading for Fun Fact and Useful Fact. Now both English-localised copies use English names and only the Swedish locale shows the Swedish ones.
• fix Hangman and Ghost out of worksheets. Both games rely on timed or turn-by-turn interaction that has no paper analogue; they are now documented as “not worksheet-suitable” and excluded from the generator instead of producing low-quality static sheets.

May 25, 2026

New

• new Tower of Hanoi at /hanoi - move all disks from peg 1 to peg 3 using the fewest moves. Scales from 3 to 7 disks.
• new Infinity Loop at /infinityloop - rotate pipe tiles to form one seamless connected loop with no open ends.
• new Akari (Light Up) at /akari - place lightbulbs on a grid to illuminate every white cell without any two bulbs shining at each other.
• new Shikaku at /shikaku - divide a grid into rectangles so each rectangle contains exactly one number equal to its area.
• new Nurikabe at /nurikabe - shade cells to form rivers while leaving numbered island groups of exactly the right size. Classic Nikoli logic puzzle.
• new Slitherlink at /slitherlink - draw one single closed loop between dots. Numbers say how many sides of that cell the loop uses. Classic Nikoli puzzle.
• new Hashiwokakero (Bridges) at /hashiwokakero - connect numbered island circles with bridges (1 or 2) so every island is reachable and totals match.
• new Feeling Circle at /emotions - learn Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions: match complex feelings to their primary components and explore intensity levels.
• new City Defense overhaul. The Heavy Friction idle at /heavy-friction is now a full city-defense strategy game with 10 technology eras (Stone Age to Digital), exponential wave scaling, and 8 city buildings including the Riksbank, Warehouse, and Citadel.

Improved

• improve Simpler header menus. By topic now lists the games themselves, grouped by skill, with each game opening its own page · and every menu (By topic · By age · Worksheet) opens with a single click on its name. Your starred games sit pinned at the top of the By topic menu, and "All games" is one click away from any menu.
• improve Clearer leaderboard. The country leaderboard now shows the real average study time per player instead of a percentile, and the "worksheets downloaded by country" board ranks each country by position rather than a raw download count.

May 21, 2026

New

• new One-click worksheets by age. Pick an age in the header's Worksheet menu and a full, age-appropriate practice worksheet is generated instantly · numbered questions, lettered choices, and an answer key on the last page. You're greeted by the worksheet itself; print it, save it as a PDF, or download the HTML.
• new Tweak the worksheet without leaving the page. A Settings / Stats / FAQ bar now sits under every worksheet (just like the games). Add or remove games, change difficulty, or set the number of problems and the worksheet above updates as you go. Click an age again for a fresh set.
• new Browse games by topic or by age. The header now has By topic and By age dropdowns alongside Library · browse games grouped by skill (the way the blog roundups are organised) or by the age each game suits, with every game opening pre-tuned for that age.

Improved

• improve Worksheets count toward your progress. Every worksheet you download now appears on your profile under "your stats" and adds to your country's place on the leaderboard, including a new "worksheets downloaded by country" ranking.

May 20, 2026

New

• new Favorites pin to the top. Star a game (☆) and it jumps to a "Favorites" row at the top of both the Library menu and the All games page, so your go-to games are always one tap away.

Fixed

• fix Removed two games that weren't pulling their weight. Ice Cream and the Mosaic Maker tool have been retired so the catalogue stays tight and every game on it is one we stand behind.
• fix The animated headline now types in every language. The front-page headline used to freeze on a static word in every language except English. It now types, pauses and retypes in all 25 languages, with the same blinking cursor everywhere.
• fix Time spent now counts real play time. The "Time memorising" tile on your profile and the "Study time" column on the leaderboard recorded zero for everyone. They now track active on-screen time and pause when you switch tabs or step away.
• fix Leaderboard "Longest streak" shows the actual number. It was showing a percentage instead of your best run in a row.
• fix Facts and Crazy Comparisons show the result before moving on. Both games now highlight right vs. wrong and wait for you to continue, instead of jumping straight to the next question, and their answer buttons match the rest of the site.
• fix Emoji Typewriter looks and reads right. The preview no longer renders on a black background, and its buttons and helper text are translated instead of showing raw text labels.
• fix Help "?" tips open on tap. Tapping a help "?" now pins its explanation open on touch screens (tap again, tap away, or press Esc to close).
• fix Sign-in box always fits the screen. The "Save your streak" sign-in card now centres when it fits and scrolls when it's taller than the screen, so the email field and button are never cut off on small phones.
• fix Library menu fits on phones. The game menu no longer runs off the edge of the screen and now scrolls inside the menu so you can reach every game.
• fix Game pages no longer sit flush against the top menu on phones. Every page now leaves a clear gap below the floating menu bar, so the first row of controls (like the country / topic pickers in the geography game) isn't cramped right under it.

Improved

• improve The landing page comes alive. MemPi now reacts when the falling pi digits splash on it, glances at drops before they land, walks along the manifesto band, and peeks in from the edge now and then; game cards give a little nudge as you browse. All of it respects "reduce motion" and pauses when the tab is in the background.
• improve Consistent in-game menus everywhere. The in-game Settings panel and the topic / option dropdowns now share one design across every game (geography, Simon, unit converter and more) instead of slightly different per-game versions.
• improve Livelier landing headline. The "Level up your ..." headline now types and backspaces with a human rhythm - pausing on punctuation, hesitating mid-word, speeding through double letters, only rewriting the part of the word that changes, and rotating through more words plus the occasional surprise trivia question.
• improve Cleaner in-game toolbar. The Settings / Stats / Help bar under each game is lighter and quieter, so it stays out of the way of the game itself.
• improve One Random Facts tool. The two separate fact spinners are now a single Random Facts tool that draws from the whole pack · practical and fun facts together.
• new Browse and learn by age. The Library now has a "By age" filter (4-7, 8-11, 11-15, 15-18) that shows only age-appropriate games and opens each one tuned for that age · and the worksheet generator can fill a sheet for an age in one tap.

May 19, 2026

Fixed

• fix Front page no longer jumps when the headline word changes. "Level up your math / memory / focus" now reserves enough horizontal space for the longest word, and every rotating word renders in the same fat Manrope as the rest of the headline (in brand pink) instead of the previous serif italic.
• fix "Best in each game" column headers line up with the values. The table now uses fixed column widths so Plays / Accuracy / Best streak / Last played / Time always sit directly above the numbers they label.
• fix Game column no longer reads "me.col.game". The header label is properly translated.
• fix Devices panel no longer shows "Unknown device". Sessions without parsed User-Agent data now fall back to Desktop / Mobile / Tablet instead of the literal "Unknown" string.

Improved

• improve Activity heatmap grows with your tenure. Brand-new players see the past 7 days (instead of 358 empty cells), 30-day veterans see the past 30 days, and only players with a year of plays see the full 365-day GitHub-style grid.
• improve MemPi mascot on the front page is friendlier. Smaller tile, white background (was a heavy ink block), so the mascot sits next to the headline as a companion instead of competing with it.
• improve Header pill is cozier. Tighter max-width and reduced gaps so brand, nav, and the streak / sign-in cluster sit close together on laptop screens instead of stretching across the viewport.
• improve Sign-in modal refreshed. Replaced the generic "P" logo with MemPi, removed the duplicate "Sign in to sync across devices" line, dropped the extra Close button at the bottom, and moved the close × to a discreet 28 px chip inside the top-right corner of the card.
• improve Leaderboard explainer text quieter. The "every country gets a composite score..." paragraph is now a short single line under the title in a lighter weight.

New

• new Country rankings on the Leaderboard. New "By country" tab shows every country's participation share, rounds played, win rate, average score, average time per round, Pi rounds, and best streak - all sortable by clicking any column header. Percentages compare each country against the global total so you can see at a glance which countries play the most and which score highest.
• new Leaderboard is now a country-vs-country contest. The dashboard is one page with one ranking: every country gets a composite 0-100 score from five percentage-style sub-scores (win rate, performance, efficiency, engagement intensity, consistency), each percentile-mapped against the rest of the population. Small countries with sharp play can outrank large ones. Game and language tabs are gone; click any column header to re-sort.

Improved

• improve Hangman wins and losses now count. Every finished word records a round to your stats and to the leaderboard, including losses. The game also tracks how long each word took so the time-spent metric finally moves when you play.
• improve Profile page reordered. "Best in each game" now sits above Badges so the concrete results land before the gamified chrome. The Devices panel moves to second-last (just above Delete data). The sort dropdown was replaced with sortable column headers - click a column name like in a spreadsheet to re-sort.
• improve Streak badges differentiated. Ember, Blaze, and Inferno used to all show the same flame. They now read as a progression: candle (Ember, 7 days), flame (Blaze, 30 days), volcano (Inferno, 100 days).
• improve Devices panel uses friendlier labels. Sessions where the User-Agent didn't parse cleanly used to show "?, ?" - they now fall back to the device category (Mobile / Tablet / Desktop) or "Unknown device".
• improve Game page chrome simplified. "In-game settings" is now just "Settings"; "About this page & FAQ" is now "FAQ"; the stats collapsible is now "Stats". All three labels translated across 25 locales.
• improve Stats panel always starts closed. The per-game Stats collapsible no longer auto-opens after a round - players who don't want their results in their face can keep it tucked away.
• improve Help tooltips no longer get clipped. The "?" bubble now renders via a portal at a fixed position above the trigger, so it can never be cropped by an ancestor's overflow:hidden (which is what happened inside the Stats collapsible).
• improve "Almost there" badge ribbon fully visible. The corner ribbon that highlights your next badge used to be clipped by the badge tile - it's now a centered pill at the top of the tile so the full label shows.
• improve Header pill snugger on laptops. Max width 980 px (down from 1180 px) and the Library nav no longer stretches into the middle, so the streak chip and account badge sit close to the nav instead of floating with empty space between them.
• improve Pi page chrome tightened. The "How to play" helper above the numpad is gone - the numpad sits directly under the constant-mode nav now. The constant-mode nav itself has a touch more breathing room below the floating header.
• improve Sign-in modal explains what you get. The OTP form now leads with four short benefits (cloud sync, country leaderboard, badges, offline play) so visitors know what an account unlocks before typing their email.
• improve Streak number consistent between dropdown and header. The account dropdown's mini-streak chip now pulls the authoritative cloud value the same way the header streak chip does, so signed-in players don't see two different numbers ("2-day fire" inside the dropdown, "3-day fire" on the header pill).

Improved

• improve Pop color palette applied site-wide. Updated design tokens: ink is now deep indigo-purple, the page background is warmer cream, coral red replaces the previous pink accent, and sun yellow becomes the primary call-to-action color. All game tiles now show white cards with a color-tinted icon box instead of a fully tinted card background, making the game name and description easier to read at a glance.
• improve Header wordmark updated. "Play" renders in ink and "memorize" in italic coral red, matching the refreshed brand identity.
• improve Footer redesigned with dark background. The site footer now uses a deep ink background with light-on-dark text, giving the page a clear visual end-cap and improving contrast.

May 18, 2026

New

• new Hundreds of new geography guides. Every country with at least a couple of notable cities, mountains, rivers or lakes now has its own step-by-step memorisation guide · in English and in several more languages · each with a playable round embedded right in the article and a ready-made mnemonic to hang the places on.
• new Top game pages now read in your language below the fold. The "About this page" and FAQ sections on the most-played games (Labyrinth, Polymath, Pi, Memory and Geography) used to fall back to English · they now render in your language, matching the rest of the page.

Improved

• improve A refreshed look across the whole site. Every game, button, card and menu moved to one cleaner visual language · thinner borders, pill-shaped buttons and chips, calmer pastel colours for game feedback, rounder cards, and the same shadows and focus outlines everywhere. The blog's tip, warning and key-point boxes and the library tiles now share that frame too, spacing tightens neatly on phones, and printing any page or worksheet comes out clean.
• improve Pricing, Schools and Library pages now speak every language. These pages used to show English copy below a localised header; every line now reads in your language across all 25.
• improve Install the app in your language and it stays in your language offline. The offline app now keeps your language's home and game pages cached, so opening it with no connection lands you on the right page instead of the English one.

Fixed

• fix Rounds you finish offline no longer count twice. When a round saved while you were offline and synced later, a flaky connection could occasionally record it more than once and inflate your counts. Each round now lands exactly once.
• fix Optional analytics now follow your cookie choice. Page-view, performance and error reporting only run once you have accepted analytics; the basics the site needs to work are unaffected.
• fix Periodic Table labels the lanthanide and actinide rows by name instead of the internal "Group L" / "Group A" codes.

May 17, 2026

New

• new More to play across the catalogue. Riddles gained 15 new puzzles, Which Philosophy four more positions, Order by Size 13 new items, Tone Knowledge eight more melodies (all traditional or public-domain), Fast Typing 29 new sentences and stanzas, and Word Square three new grids · so long streaks run further before anything repeats.
• new A richer progress page. Your stats page now leads with the game you are strongest at and the badge you are closest to earning, groups your badges by category with "almost there" and "recently earned" ribbons, lets you sort your per-game list, and labels the activity heatmap by month and weekday in your language.
• new A smoother sign-in. The code step now shows a live "expires in" countdown, a Resend button, and a spam-folder hint.

Improved

• improve The app is ready to play offline in seconds. Installing now caches a small core straight away and warms the rest in the background, so the offline-ready state shows up almost at once instead of after a long wait.
• improve Every country guide has the same helpful callouts. Every "memorise the top cities of X" article now carries the same tip, strategy, key-point and warning boxes as the original Sweden guide · on time-boxing, mnemonics, clustering, active recall and spaced repetition · kept in parity across all 25 languages.
• improve German articles read in German again. The geography series had shipped with ASCII stand-ins ("groessten Staedte"); the umlauts are back ("größten Städte").
• improve The stats page reads better on touch. Help tooltips open on tap, the heatmap scrolls to your most recent activity, and the most motivating numbers · current streak and accuracy · now read first.

Fixed

• fix Taps no longer count twice on phones. Whack-a-Mole, Circle Puzzle, Cups, Catch the Cat, Bubble Wrap and Scratch Card registered a single touch as two, so scores and move budgets were off · each now counts one tap as one.
• fix The mobile menu closes when you tap a link, press Escape, or tap outside it, returning focus to the button · and the install strip no longer hides the footer.
• fix In-game buttons and reveals now read in your language. The Continue and skip-question buttons, and the post-answer reveals in Hangman, Wordle and Geography, were stuck in English on some pages · they now match the page language across all 25 locales.
• fix Better screen-reader support in Wordle and Hangman, with proper spoken names for the keyboard keys, the gallows and the word area.
• fix The "Sign in" button works from the first moment you see it, and the blog header no longer mislabels itself as "Pi".
• fix Bubble Wrap and Scratch Card match the flat design, dropping their gradient fills for solid colours.

May 13, 2026

New

• new But Why Though at /butwhy · real "how does it work?" explanations with the key words missing. The answer types itself out across the screen and pauses on each blank for you to pick the right word from three options · get every blank right to clear the round. Launch pool covers seventy questions across appliances, transport, technology, the body, nature, food chemistry, space and physics. Worksheet-supported. Plays offline.
• new Which Philosophy? at /whichphilosophy. A famous philosophical statement appears (“I think, therefore I am.”, “Existence precedes essence.”) and you pick the philosophy or movement it represents. The pool covers 30+ canonical statements across ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, philosophy of mind, and existence (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Confucius and others). Worksheet-supported.
• new Wordle mini-game variant. The full multi-attempt Wordle still lives at /wordle; the labyrinth and Polymath now also draw a single-round “find the missing letter” round from the same word lists. One letter of a real Wordle word is blanked and you pick the missing letter from four choices. Difficulty 1-3 draws from the easy (4-letter) pool, 4-7 from medium (5-letter), 8-10 from hard (6+).
• new Curated name facts in Name Rarity. When the reveal panel shows the two names, names in the curated set (~65 well-known names so far) get an extra card with the name’s origin and a famous bearer (e.g. “Andie · Scottish, diminutive of Andrew. Andie MacDowell, American actress in ‘Groundhog Day’.”). Set will grow.
• new Storybook tool at /storybook · read Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Lion and the Mouse” in any of the 25 PlayMemorize languages, then print on paper or save as PDF for the bookshelf. The reader picks a letter case (Normal or ALL CAPS, shown only where the script has cases) and a font from a 10-face picker · every option previews in its own typeface, with accessibility-focused choices like OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Lexend, and Andika, plus Comic Neue, Patrick Hand, Caveat, IBM Plex Mono, Fraunces and the default Manrope. Plays offline as part of the PWA.

Fixed

• fix Recent games (proverbs, butwhy, whichphilosophy, every educational-suite game, the classic-toy batch and the cloze-fact pair) no longer crash on Start. The shared GameModuleApp wrapper used to take the GameModule as a prop, which Astro’s client:load boundary silently JSON-serialised · stripping the MiniGame / generate / paramsFromDifficulty functions. Pressing Start mounted <MiniGame /> with a null type and React threw "Element type is invalid". The wrapper now loads the module itself via loadModule(gameId) so the function references never have to cross the boundary, and all 24 affected games are playable again.
• fix Sign-in popup is easier to see and the Cancel button no longer points off-screen. The modal gained a hairline border and a soft shadow so it can’t blend into the page behind it, and the rogue → arrow that the ghost-button CSS appended to every Cancel button across the site is gone.
• fix Footer language picker is clickable on every page. The dropdown script only loaded on pages that used the old SiteNav, so on content pages and game pages the “Language” button in the footer did nothing. The script is now bundled with the footer and runs once site-wide.
• fix Color mini-game grows one tile per win like Simon. The labyrinth and Polymath versions used to draw a brand-new random sequence every round; they now extend the previous sequence with one new colour, matching the standalone game. The countdown digit also sits on a contrasting ink-bordered disc so it can’t disappear into the board background.
• fix Nuance mini-game no longer flashes the answer between rounds. The 60 ms colour transition on the glyph could leak the previous round’s peak-contrast reveal for a single frame as the next round mounted. The transition is now suppressed while the round is in the asking phase.
• fix Geo mini-game shows where the answer was when you miss. A wrong tap used to instantly swap the country, which felt like the game changed under the player. It now flashes the wrong cell red, highlights the correct one with the feature name, and pauses for a beat before handing control back to the host.
• fix Country game no longer hands you the answer. Several country facts named the country adjective in the currency (“Turkish lira”, “Swiss franc”, “Egyptian pound”). Those are rewritten so the fact still tells you the currency without giving the country away.
• fix Find the difference starts small and grows. The mini-game began at a 4×4 wall (16 cells); it now starts at 3×3 and adds a row+column every two wins, matching the “one step harder per success” cadence the rest of the catalogue uses.
• fix Streak hosts never serve the same question twice in a row. Both ModuleStreakGame and MiniGameStreakApp now compare the next round’s prompt key against the last three rounds and re-derive the seed up to six times if it matches.

Improved

• improve Library header dropdown shows the current game name. The “Library” link in the top bar is now a dropdown of every game grouped by category, and on a game page the trigger label flips from “Library” to that game’s name so you always know where you are without scrolling.
• improve Quiz warm-up uses an OTP-style number. The five-digit memorise step is now six digits rendered as BOX BOX BOX – BOX BOX BOX, matching the sign-in code shape, and waits for a Next tap before switching to the input view instead of auto-advancing on a timer.

Removed

• fix Retired the /paths pages. The course-style learning paths had fabricated instructor names and enrolment counts and didn’t reflect the catalogue. /paths and /paths/<slug> now 301-redirect to the matching library group (so links like /paths/memory open the library at the Memory section).

May 12, 2026

New

• new Scratch Card at /scratchcard · scratch off a grid of foil cells one tap at a time and try to uncover enough of the prize symbol before you reveal too many blanks. A quick game of nerve and luck; the layout is fixed by the round seed. Plays offline as part of the PWA.
• new Ice Cream · a customer's cone of scoops flashes on screen, then hides; tap the flavours to rebuild it in the same order, bottom scoop first. A quick visual-memory game · the cone is fixed by the round seed. Plays offline.
• new Cups at /cups · the classic shell game. Watch which cup hides the ball, follow it through a quick shuffle of swaps, then tap the right one. Harder rounds add more cups and more swaps; the whole shuffle is fixed by the round seed. Plays offline.
• new Circle Puzzle at /circlepuzzle · tap concentric rings to rotate them and line up every marker with the guide before your move budget runs out. Harder rounds add more rings, finer notches, and fewer taps. Plays offline.
• new Whack-a-Mole at /whackamole · moles pop up around the grid on a fixed seeded schedule; tap them before they duck back down and hit the target before the timer ends. Harder rounds get faster and bigger. Plays offline.
• new Catch the Cat at /catchthecat · block cells on a hex board to wall the cat in before it slips off the edge. A pure logic puzzle · the cat always takes the shortest path to the boundary, so every round is deterministic. Harder rounds use a bigger board and fewer head-start walls. Plays offline.
• new Minnesluckan at /usefulfact · a fill-in-the-blank quiz over a pack of practical facts (boiling points, distances, dates, body trivia). One word is blanked; pick the option that completes it. Difficulty sets the number of choices, level widens the fact pool. The pack is translated into all 25 languages; worksheet-supported.
• new Lucktexten at /funfact · the playful sibling of Minnesluckan · same fill-in-the-blank shape, but the facts are the quirky kind (cube-pooping wombats, three-hearted octopuses, the weight of a cloud). Separate pool from Minnesluckan; translated into all 25 languages; worksheet-supported.
• new Faktageneratorn tool at /faktageneratorn · tap for a random practical fact in your language, roll another, or copy the one you like. No scoring · just the fact-pack on a spinner. Works offline.
• new Fakta-snurran tool · the fun-fact counterpart of Faktageneratorn · spins through the surprising-trivia slice of the same pack, one fact at a time. Works offline.

Fixed

• fix "I disagree · skip ahead" button is now translated everywhere. The skip-ahead button, its tooltip, and the thank-you confirmation were shipping as English placeholder text in all 24 non-English locales. They are now translated into every PlayMemorize language.

Improved

• improve Trig Drills and the Rubik’s notation quiz now show the answer before moving on. Both games jumped to the next round the instant you tapped a choice. They now pause on a ✓/✗ panel with what the answer was · tan(45°) = 1, or R′ spelled out as “right face · counter-clockwise” · and wait for a Continue tap, matching the post-answer reveal the rest of the catalogue already has.
• improve More of the home page now shows in your language. The “Finance” and “Tools” section headings on the home tile grid, and the banner’s “60+ games · 50+ countries · 25 languages” stats line, were still rendering in English on every locale. All three now carry translations for the full 25-language set.
• improve Heavy Friction moved to /heavy-friction. The tactile idle game previously lived at /paperclip · that address now redirects to the new one, and any in-progress factory state carries over automatically on first load. Bookmarks and home-screen shortcuts keep working.

May 11, 2026

New

• new Crocodile Dentist at /crocodile. Tap a tooth to check it · most are safe, one or more are traps. Hit a trap and the croc snaps shut. Difficulty scales the trap count (one trap at easy, four at hard) and the mouth grows wider with the streak. First of a small classic-toy batch.
• new Proverbs at /proverbs. A classic saying appears in your language with one word missing · pick the word that completes it (“Don’t cry over spilled ___”, “Better late than ___”). Each locale plays its own sayings; the wrong options are real words from the other sayings so the choice isn’t trivial. Starts with a small pool, meant to grow.
• new Bubble Wrap at /bubblewrap. A digital sheet of bubble wrap with a clock · tap every un-popped bubble before time runs out. Some start flattened; harder rounds leave fewer pre-popped, give a tighter budget, and grow the sheet. Made for touch.
• new Dice Roller at /dice. Roll 1 to 100 six-sided dice at once · big visual grid, running total and average, instant re-roll. Works offline. Handy for board games, tabletop RPGs, and probability experiments.
• new Print / Save as PDF on every blog article. A button at the end of every article opens the browser print dialog with a stylesheet that drops the navigation, footer, install banner, action buttons, and the “more on this game” cross-links. Background tints on the styled boxes flatten to thin outlines so the article reads cleanly on paper or in a PDF reader.
• new View as Markdown source on every blog article. A link beside the print button dumps the raw Markdown of the article so it can be copied into notes or another editor.

Fixed

• fix Finance games now make sense. Candlestick Patterns, Options Greeks, and Stock Valuation were showing prompts whose “correct” answer didn’t follow from what was on screen · a random price bar paired with a random pattern name, a fixed scenario paired with a random Greek, an always-“fairly valued” verdict regardless of the numbers. Each round is now built answer-first: Candlestick draws an OHLC bar that genuinely forms the pattern, Options Greeks pairs a concrete scenario with the Greek it actually describes, and Stock Valuation derives the verdict from the metric versus its benchmark.
• fix Wordle now only accepts real words. A guess used to be graded as long as it had the right number of letters · you could type ZZZZZ and burn an attempt on it. Guesses are now checked against the word list for the difficulty; an unknown word shakes the row and shows “Not in the word list” instead of using up a turn.

Improved

• improve A game error no longer takes over the page. If a game throws an error mid-round it now shows a compact “try again” card in place · the header, footer, and the rest of the page stay usable. In Polymath, a flaky sub-game skips that round instead of ending the run. A new automated check also presses Start on every game on each release, so a crash-after-Start regression is caught before it ships.
• improve Plainer product copy. Removed lingering absolute claims (“forever”, “ever”, “always”) from the pricing and schools pages and from every game’s “Is it free?” answer, and toned down the homepage badge.

May 9, 2026

Fixed

• fix Every mini-game now gets harder by exactly one step per win. All 35 games in the mini-game pool (Memory, Sequences, Stroop, Color, Pi, Ghost, Analogies, Define, Polyglot, Matrix, Spatial, Tones, Backwards, and more) used to require 2–10 consecutive wins before difficulty increased at all. Each game now adds exactly one unit after every win: one more digit of pi, one more card pair, one more colour in the Simon sequence, one more term in the sequence, one more round of Stroop, and so on up to the game’s cap.
• fix Footer missing from home page. The site footer (Changelog, Privacy, Terms, contact) was absent from the home page. It is now shown.
• fix Category cards no longer jump during mobile scroll. The hover-lift effect on the Numbers / Memory / Knowledge / Reasoning / Polymath path cards was triggering on touch devices mid-scroll, causing a distracting pop. The lift is now gated to pointer devices only (@media (hover: hover)).

New

• new Library page at /library. Browse all 60+ games grouped by category with inline SVG illustrations and tinted cards.
• new Paths pages at /paths. Four learning paths (Numbers, Memory, Knowledge, Reasoning) with recommended game sequences.
• new Quiz flow at /quiz. 60-second quiz that matches you to the right games based on your learning goals.
• new Schools page at /schools. Information for educators using PlayMemorize in classrooms.
• new Pricing page at /pricing.

Improved

• improve Full site redesigned with Edtech v2 design system. New palette (flame/emerald-ink on warm cream), new fonts (Manrope body, Fraunces display, IBM Plex Mono), and 33 hand-authored SVG game decorations. Homepage gets an animated Pi orbit hero, category path tiles that jump to the right library section, and a 2-column responsive game grid.
• improve Navigation redesigned. New top bar with Library, Paths, Quiz, Pricing, and Login links. Responsive mobile menu. Footer restructured with cleaner column layout.
• improve Homepage redesigned. A category path strip (Numbers, Memory, Knowledge, Reasoning) sits between the hero and the game grid so you can jump straight to a category without scrolling.
• improve Neutral product language. Removed “forever free”, “no ads”, and similar absolute commitments from game descriptions and FAQ answers across the site.
• improve Privacy and Terms updated to reflect optional account creation, email storage, session cookies, and the Resend email delivery provider.

May 8, 2026

Fixed

• fix Every mini-game now gets harder by exactly one step per win. All 35 games in the mini-game pool (Memory, Sequences, Stroop, Color, Pi, Ghost, Analogies, Define, Polyglot, Matrix, Spatial, Tones, Backwards, and more) used to require 2–10 consecutive wins before difficulty increased at all. Each game now adds exactly one unit after every win: one more digit of pi, one more card pair, one more colour in the Simon sequence, one more term in the sequence, one more round of Stroop, and so on up to the game’s cap.
• fix Footer missing from home page. The site footer (Changelog, Privacy, Terms, contact) was absent from the home page. It is now shown.
• fix Category cards no longer jump during mobile scroll. The hover-lift effect on the Numbers / Memory / Knowledge / Reasoning / Polymath path cards was triggering on touch devices mid-scroll, causing a distracting pop. The lift is now gated to pointer devices only (@media (hover: hover)).

New

• new OTP sign-in. Passwordless login now uses a 6-digit code emailed to you instead of a magic link. Enter the code directly in the sign-in modal · no redirects, no tab-switching. Code expires in 5 minutes; 5 wrong guesses invalidate it.

Improved

• improve Wordle word list expanded from ~280 to 700+ entries; removed invalid words (EAGL, JESTY, ZOMBI); removed share button.
• improve Crossword now has 4 puzzles per difficulty tier instead of 1, so the same puzzle no longer repeats on every session.
• improve Finance group on the home page. Candlestick Patterns, Options Greeks, and Stock Valuation are now grouped under Finance instead of Numbers for clearer navigation.

Fixed

• fix Red Day Match date labels no longer contain emdashes; replaced with hyphens throughout.

May 7, 2026

New

• new Wordle at /wordle. Iterative-deduction word game with green/yellow/grey tile feedback. Easy 4-letter, medium 5-letter, hard 6+ letter modes; 5-7 attempts depending on difficulty.
• new Word Square at /wordsquare. Anagram-pool puzzle · form words using only the letters in the grid. Every grid contains a pangram that uses every letter. 3x3, 4x4, and 5x5 sizes.
• new Crossword at /crossword. Small intersecting-word grids with Across and Down clues. Easy direct definitions, medium synonyms, hard cryptic-flavoured clues.
• new Hash at /hash. The logic-black-box game · probe inputs, watch outputs, deduce the hidden function. Linear shifts on Easy, character-type rules on Medium, positional math on Hard.
• new Fast Typing at /typing. Real-time WPM and accuracy with a 200+ poem-excerpt library. Single words, full sentences, or whole stanzas. Mobile and desktop both supported.
• new Guess the Country at /country. Three escalating facts narrow it down · geography, economy, landmark. Score higher the earlier you commit.
• new Red Day Match at /redday. Match public holidays to their date, religion, or country. Filter by Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or Secular.
• new Conversion Tools section at /tools. Eleven mobile-first conversion utilities: Roman numerals, base converter, scientific notation, fractions, time zones (DST-aware), date calculator, distance between cities, coordinate converter, lat/long finder, temperature, cooking measurements.
• new Three Red Day articles. History of Red Days, Lunar vs Solar holidays, Global Work Cultures: Bank Holidays across 50 Countries.
• new Audiences · 100 role-based landing pages at /roles/. Surgeons, pilots, toddlers, retirees, polyglots, detectives, and 94 more. Each page recommends 2–3 PlayMemorize games for that audience, explains why those games match the cognitive demands of the role, and embeds every recommended game inline so visitors can play them immediately. Localised in 25 languages with English fallback for the per-role descriptions while the translation pipeline catches up.

Improved

• improve History-game facts now ship in all 25 PlayMemorize languages. The two-to-four-sentence factual descriptions for every event in He Did What?!, Who Did, When Did, and Order by When are translated across all 25 locales · 115 events × 25 languages = 2,875 hand-crafted descriptions covering every Code of Hammurabi, Photo 51, and James Webb launch in Bengali, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, and the rest of the catalog.

May 6, 2026

New

• new Mosaic Maker + Emoji Typewriter (creator tools). A Tools group on the home page collects browser-only utilities. Mosaic Maker drops the OKLab quantizer behind the Mosaic game in your hands · drag in any image and it comes back as a 100 000-cell hex mosaic painted from the same 45-chip palette the catalogue paintings use. Emoji Typewriter turns any letter, word, or sentence into a mosaic of random emojis spelling the text. Both run entirely in the browser · nothing leaves the device.
• new Name Rarity at /name-rarity. Type your first name to see its rank in the US top 1000 (boys + girls), with a "1 in N" denominator and a rarity bucket; then play a streak game guessing which of two names is rarer.

Improved

• improve History games now expand each event into a few-sentence fact. He Did What?!, Who Did, When Did, and Order by When now follow the "Correct answer:" line with two to four sentences explaining the deed, the people involved, and why it mattered. The historical-events dataset gained per-event factual descriptions covering all 115 events; the four games render them directly in their reveal panel so players who come for the facts actually leave with one.

May 5, 2026

New

• new Wondrous Shannon at /wondrous-shannon. Pick one of sixty famous public-domain melodies (Twinkle Twinkle, Ode to Joy, Greensleeves, Auld Lang Syne, Bach’s Prelude in C, Pachelbel’s Canon, Satie’s Gnossienne, Chopin’s Prélude in A, …) and learn to play it back on a seven-key piano, three notes at a time. Each successful round grows the segment by one note until the whole melody is in your fingers. Sister game to Tone Knowledge · the song picker replaces random sequences, and the white-key constraint replaces the chromatic table.
• new Worksheet generator at /worksheets. Build a printable practice sheet from any combination of supported games. Pick games, tune per-game difficulty + parameters, choose 10–1000 problems, decide between grouped-by-topic or random order, and either Print/Save-as-PDF or Download HTML. Every sheet ships with numbered questions, lettered (A/B/C/D) choices, and an answer key on the last page.
• new "Generate worksheet" button on every supported game. Math, Sequences, Define, Riddles, Analogies, Convert, Polyglot, Facts, Backwards, Odd One Out, Ghost, Geography, and Comparisons each carry a button that deep-links into the master generator pre-filtered to that game. Open it, set difficulty and problem count, hit print.
• new Tools group on the home page. A new section below the game catalog lists non-game utilities. The worksheet generator is the first one; the same group appears at the bottom of the game-switcher dropdown.

April 30, 2026

Improved

• improve Silhouette shows the full outline after you answer. Hard and Medium rounds clip the silhouette during the question (one half or one quadrant hidden). Once you pick an answer the full unclipped shape appears in the result panel so you can see what you were looking at before clicking Continue.
• improve Continue button is the same everywhere. Every game that ends a round with a Continue button (Who Did, When Did, He Did What, Silhouette, Order by When, Order by Size, Sort Em Up) now uses the same coral primary button, replacing the inline green / red styles that varied between games.
• improve Where's MemPi 16-piece grid no longer stacks cells. A CSS containment conflict between container-type: inline-size on cells and aspect-ratio: 1 caused the grid to collapse in some browsers at low counts. Removed the per-cell container context; the badge overlay now scales from the wall container instead.
• improve Changelog, About, blog posts and other content pages no longer show the Pi game-switcher dropdown. The shared header on content pages was inheriting the Pi game context from the layout default. Content pages now render the clean wordmark-only header, matching the home page.

• improve Difficulty selectors read Easy / Medium / Hard. Order by When, Order by Size, Sort em Up, Who Did, When Did, He Did What, and Silhouette previously offered the difficulty knob as numeric tiers (3, 5, 7, 9). Each game now shows the same three named tiers as the rest of the catalogue, mapped to the underlying difficulty values 3, 6, and 9.
• improve Silhouette gets harder at higher tiers. Easy still shows the full silhouette. Medium randomly slices off one quadrant (a quarter of the outline). Hard slices off one half. The clip is part of the deterministic round seed so a shared link or replay shows the same partial silhouette every time.
• improve Where's MemPi greets you before the run. The idle panel now opens with MemPi waving and saying hello in your language, so the player knows what they are looking for before the wall of decoys appears. The "Find MemPi · tap his cell" line that used to sit above the wall is gone · the wall is the prompt.
• improve Where's MemPi wall spacing is consistent at every count. The wall now uses container-relative gaps (cqi units) so the visual breathing room between cells stays the same whether you pick 16, 36, 64, 100, 144, or 256. Previously the absolute 4-pixel gap looked tight at low counts and sparse at high counts.
• improve Polymath runs end with a panel, not a blink. Polymath, Math Polymath, Knowledge Polymath, Memory Polymath, and Reasoning Polymath now show a Lost panel after a wrong answer · MemPi reacts (happy on a personal best, sleepy otherwise), the final streak and best-streak are surfaced, and a Play Again button restarts the run. Previously the run flipped straight back to idle, which felt abrupt. The standalone-game lost panel now also includes MemPi for parity.

Fixed

• fix He Did What no longer leaks the answer. Events whose translated label mentions the actor's own name (or any other actor's name) are filtered out of both the truth pool and the decoy pool. So a prompt like "Andreas Vesalius · 1543" no longer surfaces "Vesalius publishes modern anatomy text" as a choice; the player has to know the deed, not pattern-match the surname.

April 29, 2026

Improved

• improve Silhouette · Normal and Hard finally feel different. Same-category distractors now kick in at difficulty 4 (was 6), so a Normal round puts a deer next to a horse, donkey, and llama instead of a deer next to pizza and Mount Fuji. Hard tier adds a famous-landmark pool (Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Sydney Opera House, Pyramids of Giza, Leaning Tower of Pisa, Stonehenge, Taj Mahal, Empire State Building, Christ the Redeemer, Great Sphinx) rendered as inline SVG · the silhouettes mix into the choice grid at difficulty 7 and become the only options at difficulty 9. All ten landmarks ship translated into every PlayMemorize language.

New

• new Heavy Friction · a tactile idle game on PlayMemorize. A stack of industrial sliders, each with a constant snap-back force fighting your drag. Push a handle from 0% to 100% to produce one Resource. Resources accumulate in a Warehouse and the Auto-Seller drains them slowly into Money you reinvest in less Friction (Speed upgrades), Auto-Slide (the handle moves on its own), Auto-Seller (faster sales), and New Sliders (a fully independent rack of bars). Production is fast and manual; revenue is slow and automated · the bottleneck is the whole game. Plays offline as part of the PWA.
• new Idle · a new game category. The home page and the game-switcher dropdown now show a sixth group, Idle, alongside Memory, Knowledge, Numbers, Reasoning, and Polymath. Idle games are deliberately exempt from the labyrinth and Polymath roulette · their pacing doesn't fit the 30-second mini-game shape · so they live as standalone pages and the player chooses how long to stay.
• new "I disagree · skip ahead" button on every round. A small ghost button now sits next to the answer choices on every shell-driven game. Click it once and the round resolves as if you had answered correctly · for the rest of the day, the button is gone for that device. We use the report to recreate that exact question and fix it. Wired through every game that uses the shared MiniGame shell · adding a new game gets the affordance for free.

April 28, 2026

Fixed

• fix Flag a Mine verdict badge no longer reads as "exit Game Mode". The small red ✗ circle that used to overlay the prompt's top-right corner after a wrong answer was visually too close to the floating Exit-Game-Mode affordance · removed in favour of the existing tinted prompt panel + mascot reveal card. The hint copy across all 25 locales no longer references long-press, since flagging on touch goes through the dedicated flag-mode toggle, not a press-and-hold gesture.

Improved

• improve New homepage banner copy. The hero now reads "Level Up Your Mind" with "Free brain games for mental workouts" as the supporting line · sharper framing of what PlayMemorize is, translated into all 25 locales.

New

• new Sort em up · rank items by an unusual property. Three categories of ordering trivia in one game · animals by brain-cell neuron count (roundworm 302 → African elephant 257 billion), athletes by documented body weight (Simone Biles, Lionel Messi, Mike Tyson, LeBron James, Shaquille O'Neal, Yokozuna), and city pairs by great-circle distance (London ↔ Paris 344 km, New York ↔ Tokyo 10,870 km, Buenos Aires ↔ Tokyo 18,370 km). Pick a single category or leave it on Mixed and let the game roll a fresh one each round. Easy mode spreads picks across the full range; Hard mode bunches them so the absolute numbers actually matter. Reuses the shared OrderingMini chrome that Order by Size and Order by When already sit on. Translated into all 25 PlayMemorize languages and registered with the labyrinth so it appears in the polymath gauntlet.
• new Where's MemPi · a hidden-object streak game. Find the MemPi mascot hiding in a wall of coral, red, and pink decoy emojis · one tap to spot him, one wrong tap ends the run. Difficulty narrows the decoy pool from rainbow (MemPi pops by colour) through a coral / red / pink mix down to coral-only at hard, where every cell on the wall is in MemPi's exact shade and only shape gives him away. Wall sizes scale from 16 to 144 cells and ramp higher inside the labyrinth. Translated into all 25 locales.
• new Silhouette · name the black outline. A new outline-recognition streak game · 100 famous animals, foods, vehicles, places, and objects rendered as black-out Twemoji silhouettes. At low difficulty distractors come from any category and the silhouette alone gives the answer away; at higher difficulty distractors are pulled from the SAME category so a horse silhouette sits next to deer, llama, and donkey and the player has to discriminate fine outline differences. Subject names reuse the existing 25-locale emoji-name corpus, so the game ships fully translated on day one. Same deterministic-seed contract as the rest of the catalogue · the labyrinth, the standalone page, and "share this round" links all render byte-identical rounds.
• new He Did What?! · history deed quiz. The inverse of Who Did · the person and year are given, the deeds are the choices. Pick which one was actually theirs. Decoys come from other actors, with same-era preference at higher difficulty so a Newton round might sit next to Halley, Hooke, and Leibniz. Reuses the same hand-curated history dataset as When Did, Who Did, and Order by When. Translated into all 25 PlayMemorize languages, works offline.
• new Polymath roundup articles translated to 23 languages. The 20 tag-roundup blog posts (/blog/all-{tag}-games-on-playmemorize) now ship in Arabic, Bengali, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Ukrainian. Hungarian ships Attention and Auditory roundups for now; the remaining 18 are pending translation. Each translated article keeps the inline mini-game embeds for every game its tag covers, so readers can practise the exact game the surrounding paragraph just explained without leaving the article.
• new Mosaic catalogue + resolution + palette expansion. The painting catalogue jumps from 10 to 30 canonical works spanning four centuries · the original ten figurative classics, eight further URL-fetched works (Composition VII, Guernica, La Muse, Portrait of Dora Maar, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Rain Princess, Feathers, a Roman mosaic), and twelve hard-edge / colour-field icons that ship as inline SVG strings rasterised through sharp at build time so they never need a network fetch (Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Albers, Newman, Reinhardt, Kusama, Johns). Per-painting cell budget bumps from 5 000 to ~100 000 · twenty times the resolution, so silhouettes and brushwork survive quantisation rather than dissolving into a coarse grid. The palette grows from 9 Unicode colour-square emojis to 45 emoji-derived hex chips (moon-cream, stone-grey, terracotta, peach, night-blue, fir-green, …) so muted oil-paint mid-tones land on a faithful sibling instead of collapsing to black; the build verifies every chip is actually picked by at least one cell. Reveal order switches from top-down scanline to a deterministic random Fisher-Yates permutation, so the painting emerges from a sparse signal rather than line by line. Translated into all 25 PlayMemorize languages.

Improved

• improve Site-wide colour pass to the Pop palette. Every legacy semantic token (--color-primary, --color-bg, --color-text, the spacing / radius / shadow scales, etc.) now resolves to a Pop token from src/styles/tokens.css · cream var(--ink) backgrounds, ink var(--ink) text, coral var(--flame) primary CTAs, sun-yellow accents. The PWA theme_color and <meta name="theme-color"> in the OS-level browser chrome match the new cream surface so the home screen icon and Safari address bar tint pick up the brand instead of the legacy off-white. The PlayMemorize wordmark on the home page now reads coral instead of the legacy blue, the streak chip and the install banner re-tinted to coral / cream, and the "Train your memory with free games" duplicate strap above the home banner was retired · the banner's own H1 already carries the marketing line.
• improve Visual answer surfaces are now reachable by keyboard and screen reader across the catalog. Geography map cells are focusable buttons with feature names; Chess Mate squares carry algebraic notation + piece + state; Sudoku Force cells expose row, column, value, and target; Spatial, Matrix, and Odd One Out options have structural descriptions instead of empty aria-labels; Spot the Difference cells announce row, column, and found state. Sighted play is unchanged; everyone else can finally play.
• improve Wrong-answer feedback now reads aloud across every text-based game. Math shows the full equation with the answer; Backwards reveals the original word and its reverse; Stroop prints the expected color; Color prints the expected sequence; Mastermind Deduce spells out the unique code in color names instead of color circles only. Screen-reader users no longer have to infer the right answer from a green-highlighted button.
• improve Labyrinth announces every move outcome to assistive tech. A polite live region narrates direction (north / south / east / west), wall blocks, item pickups, encounter triggers, and level transitions so screen-reader users get the same feedback the visual board has always given sighted players.
• improve Polymath modes announce the rolled sub-game before input. The "Now playing: Math" label is now an assertive live region so screen readers say which game just rolled before the player is asked to answer.
• improve Polyglot now reveals the correct word + emoji pairing after a wrong answer and announces round status through a polite aria-live region so progress is audible, not just visual.
• improve Ghost now shows a numeric countdown during the memorise phase. The bar that already shrinks during memorisation now sits next to a "3s" / "2s" / "1s" chip, and the count is announced through a polite live region · no more silent dead air on slow speeds.
• improve Define prompt and choices now read clearly. Category-style rounds say "Pick the category that fits this word" instead of the generic prompt, and answer labels are formatted as "Category: Food & drink" instead of the all-caps "KIND Food & drink". Wrong answers now name the correct option in text.
• improve Mosaic reveals include a one-sentence description of every painting, and the scanline phase announces "Row N / M" via a polite live region so a screen-reader player knows the picture is still painting.
• improve Memory cards now have unique accessible names. Each card announces "Card row 1 column 2: Flag Kyrgyzstan" once revealed, instead of every hidden card sharing the generic "Hidden card" label.
• improve Comparisons shows the slot-machine spin progress in text ("Spinning slot 3 / 4") through a polite live region, so the multi-second spin animation isn't a silent dead zone.
• improve Spot the Difference now draws a divider between the reference wall and the spot-the-difference wall. Larger boards (300+ emojis) used to bleed into one continuous grid; the new horizontal rule with a magnifying-glass marker makes the boundary obvious so it's clear where one wall ends and the other begins.
• improve The PWA install banner now yields while a round is in progress. It used to pop in over the answer surface mid-round; it now hides while you're mid-game and re-appears once the round ends.

Fixed

• fix Flag a Mine in-game text trimmed. The board used to carry three lines of instructional text under it during play (a "tap to reveal · toggle flag mode" rules row, a redundant prompt, and the flag-mode hint). The rules row and the playing-state prompt are gone · the flag toggle button and the landing page's About / FAQ already explain how to play. Win and lose messages still appear after the round, and the flag-mode hint still shows during play.
• fix Comparisons singular/plural grammar. Explanations like "One nails is about 3 g" now read "One of these nails weighs about 3 g". Six explanation templates were rewritten to work with plural entity labels across every category.
• fix Who Did reveal copy. Wrong-answer text now reads "The correct answer is …" instead of "The correct actor is …", which was misleading for scientists, leaders, explorers, and other non-actor historical figures.
• fix Geography United States duplicate removed. Two separate "United States" / "USA" country entries pointed at the same map; they are now a single entry. Indonesian blog articles that linked to the dropped slug have been re-routed.
• fix Labyrinth quest-giver no longer shows "Help! Help!" twice in a row. The speech bubble now hides while the quest-giver modal is open, so the same line doesn't appear simultaneously on the board and in the modal.

New

• new Ten observational-cosmology firsts added to the history dataset. historical-events-data.ts picks up Henrietta Leavitt's Cepheid period-luminosity relation (1912), Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's stars-are-hydrogen thesis (1925), Karl Jansky's discovery of cosmic radio waves (1932), the Penzias and Wilson cosmic-microwave-background detection (1965), Vera Rubin's galaxy rotation curves and dark matter (1978), the Hubble Space Telescope launch (1990, attributed to NASA), the first exoplanet around a sun-like star (Mayor and Queloz, 51 Pegasi b, 1995), the discovery of accelerating expansion / dark energy (Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt, 1998), the first direct gravitational-wave detection (the LIGO collaboration, 2015), and the first image of a black hole (the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, M87*, 2019). Nine new actors join the table, two of them collaborations in the same shape as the existing cern entry. Together with the existing Hubble-1929 row, the modern-cosmology arc is now end-to-end from 1912 to 2019. When Did, Who Did, and Order by When all surface the new rows automatically.
• new Cosmology's Century: Ten Discoveries from Cepheids to M87* · deep-dive article on the ten new history rows. Covers each discovery's date, named scientist (or collaboration), and the distractor traps players will hit (the 17-year Leavitt → Hubble causal chain, the 1965 collision between Leonov's spacewalk and the CMB detection in mixed-topic Order by When draws, why the EHT row is attributed to a collaboration rather than to Katie Bouman, and the rule that PlayMemorize stores the discovery year not the Nobel year).

April 27, 2026

Improved

• improve Mini-games ramp difficulty one step per win. Pi now starts at 3 digits and grows one digit per successful round (3 → 4 → 5 → …, capped at 100). Color, Memory, and every other module that exposed a level-scaled knob ramp the same way without each standalone page having to thread a difficulty function. Both the standalone streak host and the in-blog InlineGame embeds derive params from paramsFromDifficulty(d, streak), so a player practising in a roundup article gets the same step-by-step progression as on the dedicated game page. Tier-based games (Chess, Sudoku, Mastermind) keep their picker-driven preset.
• improve Spot the Difference inline embeds shrink to ~4 rows total. Default emoji count is now 16 (4×4) instead of 36 (6×6) so the two stacked walls fit cleanly in a blog card without the cells collapsing into a single razor-thin strip. The labyrinth ramp now scales 16 → 100 (instead of 36 → 144), still progressively harder but readable at every level.
• improve Chess Mate prompt + hint clarify the click-to-move flow. The prompt now reads "White to move · find mate in one" and the hint says "Tap a white piece, then tap its destination square" so players who arrive on a chess InlineGame embed (no choice buttons; the board itself is the input) immediately know how to play.

New

• new MemPi · the PlayMemorize mascot. Pixel-art π glyph with two eyes and a half-smile. Ships with six poses (default, happy, wink, sleep, look-up, mono) and shows up on the home hero, the 404 page, the changelog, the blog empty state, the install banner (winking), the labyrinth corner, and after every mini-game round (happy when you got it right, look-up when you didn't). Also became the install icon on Android, iOS, and the home-screen shortcut tile (cream-tile maskable variant). One <Mascot pose="…" /> component drives every appearance · drop a new pose SVG into /public/images/mascot/ and every placement picks it up.
• new Mosaic · spot the famous painting as it paints itself row by row. Ten public-domain canvases (The Starry Night, The Great Wave, The Scream, The Shipwreck of the Minotaur, Composition VII, Picasso's Self-Portrait, Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait, Woman with a Hat, Seated Nude, Udnie) downsampled to 50×100 and quantised to the Unicode 12 colour-square emoji palette (🟥 🟧 🟨 🟩 🟦 🟪 🟫 ⬛ ⬜). The mosaic reveals top-to-bottom on a single HTML5 Canvas via ctx.fillText; pick the painting from a multi-choice list before the scanline finishes and you score (1 000 × rows-left / total). The artist, year, and art movement appear after every round, so the streak doubles as an art-history primer. No source images ship · the repo holds only 5 000 single-digit emoji indices per painting; scripts/build-mosaic-paintings.mjs regenerates the data from public neural-style-transfer reference URLs in a single command. Translated into all 25 locales.

Fixed

• fix Homepage banner no longer collapses on mobile. The Pop hero used a CSS container query (@container (max-width: 640px)) to switch the banner from its 1456:360 leaderboard ratio to aspect-ratio:auto on small screens · but container queries only match descendants of the container, not the container itself. The rule never fired, so the strip stayed pinned at ~80 px tall on phones and the chip + H1 + tagline got crushed inside overflow:hidden. The banner-self property change moved into a media query (descendant rules stay in the container query, where they work), and chip / streak-badge spacing tightened up at the same breakpoint.
• fix Spot the Difference walls are always a perfect rectangle. The labyrinth count ramp produced primes like 41 / 46 / 51 / 61 / 71 between 36 and 144 · those have no good factorisation so the bottom row stuck out partial. Standalone presets 200 / 300 / 500 looked the same way because colsForAspect rounded sqrt(n*aspect) to a non-divisor (200 → 14 cols → 14×14=196 + 4 left over). Two changes: the ramp now scales the wall dimension (6 → 12 over 24 levels) and squares it, so every level is a clean N×N. colsForAspect now picks the divisor of n closest to the aspect-derived target, so 200 fills as 20×10 (or 10×20 in portrait), 300 as 20×15, and 500 as 25×20 · no row sticks out.
• improve Spot the Difference is the English name; Finn fem fel stays the Swedish nickname. The catalog label, FAQ heading, page title, and roundup-article references now lead with Spot the Difference in English. The Swedish locale still renders Finn fem fel (via per-locale i18n strings and a Swedish-specific page title) and the FAQ keeps the etymology. URL slug renamed from /finnfemfel to /spot-the-difference (sitemap, hreflang alternates, and PWA precache list all updated; internal gameId stays finnfemfel so existing high scores and analytics events keep working).

New

• new Favorite games on the home page. Every game card on the landing page now carries a star button in its top-right corner. Tap the star to pin the game to a new "Favorites" strip that appears just below the banner · your most-loved games are one tap from the top of the page on every visit. Your favorites are saved on your device, stay in sync across tabs, and the card looks just like its catalog tile. Translated into all 25 locales.
• new MemPi the mascot debuts in a homepage hero banner. The site root now opens with a Pop-system hero strip · pixel-art π-shaped mascot whose eyes follow your cursor, animated mesh background, three sample game chips, and the value prop ("Free brain games. Daily streaks.") all translated into every supported locale. Built with system fonts, container queries, and prefers-reduced-motion support, so the strip scales cleanly from a phone to the widest desktop and goes still for readers who ask it to. Banner only appears on / and /[lang]/ · every other page keeps its existing header.
• new Home page game cards now ship with bespoke per-game illustrations. Every card on the landing page has been redrawn as a "Pop tile" · square card with a CSS-only mini illustration on the top half (a simon-pad cluster for Color, a numpad strip for Math, a globe for Geography, a grid-with-a-gap for Ghost, a chronological strip for When Did, and so on across all 38 games) and the name + 1-line description below. Every illustration is pure CSS with no asset downloads, so the homepage stays under the existing performance budget while looking much richer at a glance. The full design package lives in _handoff/ as the handoff reference for the rest of the Pop migration.
• new Spot the Difference · find every altered cell between two walls of Twemoji. (Known in Swedish as Finn fem fel.) The screen shows the same wall twice · top is the reference, bottom has been altered in K cells. Tap every changed cell on the bottom wall to clear the round. Pick 100 / 200 / 300 / 400 / 500 emojis and 1 / 5 / 10 / 20 differences from the start screen; the grid columns adjust to your screen aspect ratio so cells stay roughly square. Two trick types share one deterministic generator (src/games/finnfemfel/generator.ts): visual replacement from a hand-curated cluster of look-alike emojis (smiley family, red fruits, coloured circles, numbered clocks, books) plus same-category fallback, and horizontal flip / 180° rotation gated to a curated list of emojis whose flipped form is plausibly different (animals, vehicles, tools · stars and hearts excluded because their flip is identical to the original). Reuses every emoji asset and helper the rest of the catalogue already ships · emojiPool() from Ghost / Memory, the <Emoji> Twemoji wrapper, createRng, levelRamp, the IdlePanel / GameRoundIndicator / GameStopButton shell, the unified game-analytics contract. Translated into all 25 locales. Also wired into the Labyrinth via the standard GameModule contract · paramsFromDifficulty(d, lvl) ramps wall size 36 → 144 and differences 1 → 12 across encounter levels.
• new Twenty cross-game roundup articles. Every game now carries a set of cross-cutting tags (memory, spatial, deduction, attention, language, history, no-reading … 21 in total) on top of its existing landing-page group. Each tag has a dedicated long-form article that pulls its game roster from getGamesByTag(tag) at build time, so adding a tag to a game automatically surfaces it in the roundup that should mention it. The first batch covers spatial, memory, numbers, reasoning, knowledge, language, history, pattern, deduction, attention, visual, auditory, verbal, estimation, ordering, sequence, classic-IQ-test, speed, no-reading, and trivia · twenty in-depth guides, each with every relevant game playable inline at the section that names it. Live at /blog/all-<tag>-games-on-playmemorize.
• new /blog/topics · meta-index of every roundup article, grouped by category. Cognitive skills, subject knowledge, modality, and special formats. Each card shows the tag, the game count (live from getGamesByTag(tag)), and a one-line description. The blog index now carries a "🗂️ Browse by topic" link near the top so readers can jump straight to the roundup grid.

Improved

• improve Polymath now lives at the bottom of the home page. The five game groups on the landing page (Memory · Knowledge · Numbers · Reasoning · Polymath) used to lead with Polymath because that's where the Labyrinth and the Polymath roulette live. New visitors landed on the cross-game gauntlet before they had played any individual game · backwards. The order in GAME_GROUPS now reads Memory → Knowledge → Numbers → Reasoning → Polymath, so the catalog opens with concrete one-skill games and the polymath gauntlet sits at the end as the natural graduation. The dropdown switchers and any other consumer of getGamesByGroup() follow the same order.
• improve Inline game embeds in articles now hydrate on scroll, not on page load. All <InlineGame> embeds across the 20 roundup articles switched from client:load to client:visible. Articles like the reasoning roundup (which embeds 13 games) used to hydrate every React island on first paint; now each game module loads only when its section scrolls into view. Big LCP/TTI win on the longer roundups, no behaviour change for readers who scroll through.
• improve Every blog article now surfaces related topic roundups in its CTA. The shared BlogCTA footer reads the article's primary game's tags and renders a "Topic roundups" section linking to up to three matching /blog/all-<tag>-games-on-playmemorize articles. Memory-game articles point at the memory and visual roundups; geo articles point at spatial and knowledge. Cross-linking is automatic from the tag system · no per-article wiring.
• improve Memory, Ghost, and Polyglot strategy guides now play the relevant mini-game inline. The three game-specific strategy articles (Master Emoji Memory Games, Master Your Visual Memory: Twemoji Ghost, Fast-Track Your Vocabulary: Twemoji Polyglot) used to read like a book · all prose, no practice. Each one now embeds three rounds of its own mini-game at progressively harder settings, so a reader can immediately try the technique the paragraph just explained without leaving the page. Embed structure is identical across all 25 locales; same source-of-truth game data and same in-language prompts as the standalone game pages, so translations come for free.

Improved

• improve Header and footer dropdowns now close on Escape and announce their open / closed state. The game-switcher and language-switcher menus close with Escape (focus returns to the button) and the buttons toggle aria-expanded in sync with the panel so screen readers announce the state correctly. A focus ring is now visible on the dropdown buttons when tabbing through the page.
• improve Geo pages render emoji faster. The Twemoji observer that swaps native emoji for cross-platform SVGs no longer reparses the whole page on every DOM change. It now parses only the subtree that actually mutated and coalesces bursts through requestAnimationFrame, so a flurry of React re-renders inside the Geo mini-game doesn't trigger a full document reparse anymore.
• improve Pi memorisation milestones and the crewed-spaceflight history article now embed their mini-game inline. The three Memorise the First N Digits of Pi articles (10, 50, 100) now render the Pi numpad trainer at the test-yourself step with length matching the article so readers can drill the exact digits they just learned. Pi-10's existing translations (id, nl, sv) all pick up the same embed in the same structural slot. The Six Crewed Spaceflight Firsts article embeds an Exploration-topic When Did round at the "drill these in PlayMemorize" section so the dataset additions the article describes are immediately testable. All embeds use client:visible so they hydrate only on scroll.

April 26, 2026

New

• new Six crewed-spaceflight firsts added to the history dataset. historical-events-data.ts picks up Voskhod 2 spacewalk (1965, Alexei Leonov), Salyut 1 (1971, first crewed station, attributed to the Soviet Union), STS-1 Columbia (1981, John Young), STS-7 (1983, Sally Ride), Shenzhou 5 (2003, Yang Liwei), and Crew Dragon Demo-2 (2020, SpaceX). Five new actors (alexei-leonov, john-young, sally-ride, yang-liwei, spacex); two collective rows (salyut1-station, crew-dragon-demo2) hidden from Who Did via excludeFromWhodid so the four-way actor pool stays fair. Together with the existing Gagarin, Tereshkova, and Apollo 11 rows, the crewed-spaceflight arc is now end-to-end from 1961 to 2020. When Did, Who Did, and Order by When all surface the new rows automatically.
• new Six Crewed Spaceflight Firsts: Voskhod 2 to Crew Dragon · deep-dive article on the six new history rows. Covers each mission's launch year, named astronaut, and the distractor traps players will hit (the symmetric April 12 anchor between Vostok 1 and STS-1, John Young as cross-era distractor for Apollo and Shuttle rows, the chronology of women in orbit from Tereshkova to Liu Yang, and why Salyut 1 plus Crew Dragon Demo-2 are excluded from Who Did).

Fixed

• fix Best-streak counter now refreshes when you switch a game's tier or surface. Tone Knowledge (Piano ↔ Notes), Chess Mate (easy / medium / hard), Sudoku Force, and Flag a Mine all swap the localStorage key under the hood when you change tier · but the displayed “Best” badge was frozen to whichever key was active at first mount. Switching to a new tier mid-session now reads the right high streak immediately, and personal-best events fire against the correct baseline.
• fix Flag a Mine: stale resolve timer no longer fires after Stop. The 120ms grace timer between the final tap and the win/lose reveal was untracked, so pressing Stop in that narrow window let the timer fire against the unmounted round and React would warn about state updates on an unmounted component. The timer is now cancelled on unmount and on the next round's mount.
• fix Tone Knowledge: Replay button now actually replays. Pressing “&var(--ink); Replay” mid-round used to play the audio sequence but skip the visual key-walk and leave the input cursor stranded wherever the player had got to · so the first note they tried after replaying was marked wrong because the game still expected note N, not note 1. Replay now resets the cursor to the start, walks the highlight along the surface (piano keys, fretboard, or staff) just like the first “Listen”, and cancels any in-flight timers from a prior press so mashing the button never queues stale highlights.
• fix Riddles lg-doctor: removed a distractor that was also a valid answer. The classic surgeon riddle (“the surgeon says ‘he is my son’ · how?”) carried the distractor “The boy has two fathers,” which · with same-sex parents · is itself a perfectly logical resolution: the deceased was father #1 and the surgeon is father #2. A player picking it for the right reason was being marked wrong. Replaced with “The surgeon misread the chart” (clearly invalid · doesn’t explain “he is my son”) and shuffled in “The surgeon is his godfather” in place of the older “stepfather” entry. The intended answer (“The surgeon is the boy’s mother”) and explanation are unchanged.
• fix History games: Hamlet event no longer mistimes Shakespeare’s writing year. The shakespeare-hamlet entry in historical-events-data.ts was labelled “Shakespeare writes Hamlet” with year 1603, but the play was written ~1599-1601 · 1603 is the date of the first quarto publication. The label is now “Shakespeare’s Hamlet first published,” which matches the year and reads correctly in Order by When, When Did, and Who Did. Actor (shakespeare) and year (1603) unchanged.

April 25, 2026

Improved

• improve Every game explains itself, then waits for you. Each game shows how to play before you press Start; after you answer, it shows what you picked, what the right answer was, and a one-line reason; and the next round only begins when you press Continue, so a reveal never flashes past. Consistent across every game, in all 25 languages.

New

• new “Select what to study” menu on every polymath game and the Labyrinth. Every Polymath variant (Polymath, Math, Knowledge, Memory, Reasoning) and the Labyrinth now share an identical collapsible “Game filter” widget so the player can pick which games are in the rotation before they start. Polymath ships with all of its mode-relevant games on by default; Math shows only math games; Labyrinth shows every game currently in its encounter pool. Selection persists in localStorage per game.

Fixed

• fix Geo article maps now show the city named in the heading. The Memorise Sweden's Top 10 Cities article placed each map one city behind: the section Where is Gothenburg? showed only Stockholm, the section Where is Malmö? showed Stockholm + Gothenburg, and so on. Every section now reveals the city its heading asks about, with an arrow connecting from the previous one so the route through Sweden builds up visually as the reader scrolls.
• fix Mnemonic phrase no longer overflows on mobile. The Sweden article's "Seven Good Men Usually Laugh, Very Often Having New Jokes" mnemonic rendered as one continuous run of letters with no spaces between the words on iOS Safari, spilling off the right edge of the viewport. Every word is now a separate visible token in every locale.
• fix "Open game" from a blog article now opens the game with the article's context. Tapping Open game → from the Sweden article used to drop the player on a generic Geography page; it now opens Geography pre-tuned to Sweden's cities. The dead "↻ New round" button in the inline preview is gone · the inline embed is a study illustration, not a game loop.
• fix Great Pyramid of Giza no longer credited to Qin Shi Huang. historical-events-data.ts attributed the pyramids-giza event (year −2560) to qin-shi-huang, who lived ~2,300 years later and built the Great Wall (a separate event already correctly attributed to him). The pyramid event is hidden from Who Did via excludeFromWhodid so the wrong actor never surfaced as a question, but it polluted any join over the actor table. Added a new khufu actor (“Pharaoh Khufu”) and reattributed the event correctly.
• fix Labyrinth scaling for Facts, Geography, and Crazy Comparisons. Three modules’ paramsFromDifficulty still had the legacy single-arg signature and ignored the labyrinth’s level, so deep gauntlet runs of those three games played exactly like level 5. Facts now ramps numAnswers with levelRamp (3 → 6 across the climb). Geography now ramps topN from 5 → 10 so deeper runs cover more obscure cities/rivers/mountains. Crazy Comparisons accepts the level arg for API conformance (its only knob is category, which difficulty already widens).
• fix Riddles wp-silent: distractor letter counts now match the question. The riddle asks for a 9-letter word containing all five vowels in order (answer: Facetious), but two of its five distractors · Sequential and Courageous · were 10 letters long, letting savvy players eliminate them by length alone instead of by vowel order. Replaced with Ambitious (9 letters, vowels A·I·I·O·U · tantalisingly close to the rule but missing E) and Authority (9 letters, vowels A·U·O·I · same shape as the trap pattern). All five distractors are now 9-letter English words, restoring the puzzle's intended difficulty.
• fix Screen-reader strings on Chess Mate, Flag a Mine, and Tone Knowledge are now translated. Eleven hardcoded English aria-labels were leaking out to non-English screen readers: chess piece descriptions (“white queen”, “black knight”, “legal move”), Flag-a-Mine cell states (“revealed N”, “flag”, “hidden X,Y”), and the three tone-surface containers (“Piano keyboard”, “Guitar fretboard”, “Treble-clef staff”) plus per-key “Play C4” labels. Added the keys to ui.ts across all 25 locales (English values shipped as the safe fallback, fully localised translations land in a follow-up). The piano / guitar / staff components now accept a lang prop and call useTranslations internally so the same surfaces can be reused in any future host without re-plumbing strings.
• fix Home-page tagline + section labels are now translated. The site root’s “Train your memory with free games” tagline and the five landing-group-label headings (Polymath, Memory, Knowledge, Numbers, Reasoning) were hardcoded English in src/components/LandingPage.astro. Six new keys (home.tagline plus home.group.polymath, .memory, .knowledge, .numbers, and .reasoning) added to all 25 locales in ui.ts with native translations for the major locales (sv, fr, de, es, pt, it, nl, pl, ro, cs, hu, el, uk, ru, ar, he, hi, bn, zh, ja, ko, tr, th, id) and English fallback for everything else. Per-game card label/desc translation is a separate pass.
• fix Every blog article shows a reading-time estimate. Each article now displays a localised “N min read” next to its date, computed for the language it is written in.

Improved

• improve Standardised in-game header menus across every game. The "round · streak · best" indicator, the "↺ Stop" button, and the collapsible in-game settings panel are now three shared components (GameRoundIndicator, GameStopButton, InGameSettings) in src/components/game/GameControls.jsx, replacing 14 hand-rolled copies that had drifted apart in margins, font sizes, aria-live, and spacing. Translation keys also cleaned up: ghost.round/ghost.rounds/ghost.best/ghost.stop were misnamed (every game used them) and have been renamed to game.round/game.rounds/game.best/game.stop across all 25 locales. Visible result: every game now has the same chrome at the top and bottom of a round.

New

• new Four ordering / history games: Order by When (drop historical events into chronological order), Order by Size (sort planets, animals, mountains, countries, buildings, and bodies of water from smallest to largest), When Did (multiple-choice "pick the year"), and Who Did (multiple-choice "pick the person responsible"). All four share two new data files (historical-events-data.ts, sized-items-data.ts), a shared OrderingMini click-in-order component, and a shared QuizMini prompt + vertical-choice layout. Streak-based scoring per (count, difficulty) combination, full GameModule conformance, all 25 locales translated for the chrome strings (event descriptions and actor names ship in English with locale fallbacks).

Improved

• improve Tone Knowledge grows the sequence by one note per success. The standalone /tones page now plays Simon-style on both surfaces: round 1 asks for 3 notes back, round 2 asks for 4, round 3 asks for 5, … capped at 50 (the same ceiling Color uses). The first wrong note ends the run and the streak resets · how far you can climb is the streak. Implementation extends ModuleStreakGame’s paramsOverride prop to accept a function · (streak) => Partial<Params> · re-evaluated every round so params can ramp with the streak. Tier-picker games (Chess Mate, Sudoku Force, Mastermind Deduce, Flag a Mine) keep passing static objects and stay on their one-tier-per-run difficulty model. Tones’ ramp also nudges difficulty up by one every 5 rounds so the chromatic range widens and the tempo tightens as the streak climbs · the late-game challenge isn’t just “remember more notes,” it’s “remember more notes faster across more keys.”
• improve Notes mode shows the letter under every notehead. The treble-clef staff used to render a parchment with bare noteheads only · learning to read the staff was harder than it needed to be because the player had no anchor for which dot was C, which was D, and so on. Each notehead now carries its letter label (C / C# / D / D# / …, octave digit dropped on purpose so the focus is the letter not the absolute pitch) anchored to the bottom edge of the parchment so the labels line up in a clean row regardless of staff-row height. The label tints amber when the note is highlighted during playback so the audio, the notehead, and the letter all light up together · same chromatic index drives all three so “the C you hear is the C you see is the C you read” is enforced by the same data, not by separate translations. Styled as a beginner aid, not as part of the notation. Real sheet music has no letters · pros read the notehead position against the clef. To respect that convention while still helping beginners, the labels are deliberately subtle: 10px italic serif (Georgia) at 45% opacity so they read as quiet reference text under the staff and never fight the noteheads themselves.

New

• new Labyrinth Easy/Medium/Hard new-journey tiers. The labyrinth’s in-game settings panel now exposes three tier buttons under Start a new journey at: 🟢 Easy · Lvl 0, 🟡 Medium · Lvl 25, 🔴 Hard · Lvl 50. Each rolls a fresh root seed and drops the player straight into the chosen level instead of always restarting at level 0. Hard mode is a real difficulty cliff because the per-game level scaling now caps much higher: Color asks for level colours back (3 → 50, 1:1 with the level), Memory grows to 12 pairs (24 cards) instead of capping at 6, Sequences grows to 16 elements instead of 8, and Sudoku Force’s noise scaling reaches its 60-blank ceiling well before level 25. Three new strings (labyrinth.tier.new_journey_label, tier.easy, tier.medium, tier.hard, tier.easy_desc, tier.medium_desc, tier.hard_desc) propagated across all 25 locales.

Fixed

• fix Same streak-loop bug class swept across the rest of the engine. Followed the orderwhen / ordersize / whendid / whodid fix with a sweep of every place that had the same shape: a useEffect keyed on [phase, onWin, onFail] that schedules a setTimeout(... onWin/onFail, N ms). Root cause was useMiniGameAnalytics in src/utils/gameAnalytics.js: the hook returned fresh closures every render, so every parent re-render handed down a new onWin / onFail identity, which re-fired the resolve effect in every shared chrome below it (MiniGameShell, the labyrinth’s ChallengeShell, PiEncounter, MemoryEncounter). Hook now captures the latest props in a ref and returns useCallback-stable wrappers so callback identity stays put across re-renders, and adds its own one-shot firedRef so a single mount can only resolve once. Each downstream shell got its own firedRef as a second line of defence (see MiniGameShell.tsx, ChallengeShell.tsx, PiEncounter.tsx, MemoryEncounter.tsx). Regression spec extended with mount-then-re-render checks for MiniGameShell and ChallengeShell alongside the existing OrderingMini + QuizMini ones.
• fix Streak loop on the four ordering / history games no longer auto-advances after one round. The shared OrderingMini + QuizMini chrome (used by /orderwhen, /ordersize, /whendid, /whodid) had two interacting bugs in the way it dispatched onWin / onFail back to MiniGameStreakApp. OrderingMini reset its own picks + phase state on every change to a memoised display reference, but the upstream items prop was rebuilt fresh on every parent render · so a parent re-render mid-resolve would silently flip the round back to "asking", cancelling the 1300 ms timer that was supposed to call onFail(). The streak loop never saw the wrong answer and rolled into the next round as if the round had been won, then auto-resolved again on the next render, and so on. Fixed three ways for defence in depth: MiniGameStreakApp now mounts the MiniGame with key=&var(--ink);seed&var(--ink); so each round gets a fresh component instance, holds a one-shot roundClosedRef that prevents handleWin / handleFail from re-entering during a single round, and clears the "next-round" setTimeout on Stop / unmount. OrderingMini + QuizMini each hold their own one-shot firedRef on the resolve timer, and OrderingMini’s reset effect is now keyed on seed + items.length instead of the churning display reference.
• fix Polymath rounds of Riddles now show the real options. A Polymath round of Riddles used to render the no-fail “Reveal” tour the labyrinth was using · question + a single primary button, no choices, never onFail. Polymath players ended up clicking Reveal once per round and effectively answering nothing. The riddles MiniGame now renders the same multiple-choice card the standalone /riddles page uses · question, N option buttons (ramped 3 → 6 with labyrinth level), correct/wrong styling, and the riddle’s explanation. Polymath, the labyrinth, and requestMiniGame() all share this one rendering, so “NOW PLAYING: RIDDLES” finally plays a riddle.
• fix Polyglot encounter defaults to the player’s own UI language. The hosted Polyglot encounter (Polymath, labyrinth, requestMiniGame) used to forcibly exclude the player’s UI language from the rotation · so a Swedish speaker got Korean, Japanese, and Polish words with no way to opt down. The encounter now defaults to the player’s UI language so a Swede sees Swedish words and a German speaker sees German words. The standalone /polyglot page still exposes a language picker for players who want to actually practice a foreign language. Falls back to the original foreign-language rotation only when the dataset somehow lacks the player’s UI language.
• fix Piano + chess boards fit on mobile. Both surfaces used fixed pixel widths (40px white keys × up to 14, 44px chess cells × 8 + label gutters) which overflowed below ~420px viewports · the keyboard ran off the edge of the white card and the rook on the h-file was clipped in Game Mode. Both now scale: piano keys flex to share the container’s width with black keys positioned in percent so they track the white-key flexing exactly; chess cells use clamp(30px, 10.5vw, 44px) with proportional label gutters and glyph sizes. The boards stay 44px on desktop and shrink smoothly to fit a 360px phone in Game Mode, no horizontal scroll.
• fix Polymath wrapper stretches to its host’s width. The Polymath delegate’s root <div> had no explicit width, so its sub-game inherited a content-shrunk box that rounded down further on every nested flex parent · noticeable in Game Mode where the chess / piano surface was rendered narrower than the surrounding card. Set width: 100% + display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: stretch on the Polymath wrapper so every hosted sub-game gets the full Polymath card width.

Improved

• improve Tone Knowledge picks Piano vs Notes up front. The standalone /tones page now opens with a two-tile surface picker · 🎹 Piano or 🎼 Notes · before the Start button. The selection persists in localStorage per surface and forks the high-streak board so each surface earns its own personal best. Notes mode runs the existing treble-clef staff with note-name labels off, so the goal is unambiguously “learn to read sheet music” not “match labels to dots.” The staff itself was redrawn as a parchment leaf · cream-to-amber paper gradient, ink-brown clef and noteheads, opening + closing bar lines, layered inset/drop shadows · so the page feels like a classical notebook rather than a flat svg. Guitar and mixed-instrument rounds still appear inside Polymath and the Labyrinth pool; the standalone page is the dedicated trainer for the two main shapes. Five new strings (games.tones.surface_picker, surface_piano, surface_notes, surface_piano_desc, surface_notes_desc) propagated across all 25 locales; the in-game label for the staff renamed from “Staff” to “Notes” so the chrome reads consistently with the picker.

April 24, 2026

New

• improve Geo articles embed the live Geo mini-game. The Memorise Sweden's Top 10 Cities guide (and every language of it) used to draw a static map for each city; each step is now a playable Geo round that builds up city by city, so the article always matches the real game.
• improve Strict per-locale blog filter. Non-English blog indexes (/sv/blog, /de/blog, …) used to fall back to English articles when the locale lacked its own translation, and the English-only /what/ explainers were unconditionally added to every locale’s feed. Both leaks are gone · each locale now only renders posts that have actually been translated into it. Untranslated slugs 404 instead of serving English markdown under a localised URL (the language-switcher footer still tells visitors which locales DO have a translation).
• improve The PlayMemorize logo always takes you home. Clicking the logo in the game header used to point at the current game's own landing · a no-op when the player was already on it. It now points at the site root (locale-aware), so every game page has a one-tap way out to the catalogue.
• new Per-game filter on every Polymath variant. The idle panel of /all, /polymath-math, /polymath-knowledge, /polymath-memory, and /polymath-reasoning now shows a collapsible “Game filter” checkbox list of every game in that variant’s pool. All games are checked by default; uncheck the ones you find too hard or just don’t feel like playing today and they drop out of the rotation. The selection persists in localStorage per variant and is locked the moment a streak starts so you can’t accidentally change the pool mid-run. If everything is unchecked the full pool is silently used as a fallback so the game never deadlocks. Implemented as a single pool string field on the shared makePolymathModule() schema · chooseSubGame intersects the player’s allow-list with MODE_GAME_IDS[mode] and picks deterministically from the result.
• new Tone Knowledge at /tones. Free ear-training game · hear a sequence of 1–10 musical notes, then click them back in order on a virtual instrument. Three surfaces share one chromatic pitch pool: piano (white + black keys, mouse / touch / keyboard), guitar (six strings × twelve frets, correctness checked on pitch so any equivalent fingering counts), and treble-clef staff (click at the line or space height to pick a note). Difficulty scales four dimensions at once · sequence length grows with labyrinth level (3 → 10), pitch range widens with difficulty (white keys → diatonic → chromatic 1-octave → chromatic 2-octave), tempo shrinks (600 ms → 320 ms), and note-name labels disappear at d≥5 so expert mode tests pitch recall not reading. Roughly a quarter of low-difficulty rounds (rising to three-quarters at expert) are transposed snippets of recognisable folk and public-domain melodies (Twinkle Twinkle, Ode to Joy, Für Elise opening, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Jingle Bells, Frère Jacques, Hot Cross Buns, …). When the player misses, the explainer says exactly what they played, what the target was, and the interval between · “you played E4, one semitone below F4 (minor 2nd flat).” The shared 24-note frequency table moved out of simonAudio.js into src/utils/toneAudio.js so Color, Tone Knowledge, and any future music game pull from the same source. Auto-included in the Memory Polymath pool and the full Polymath pool.
• new Chess Mate now plays like real chess. The old “pick a move from a shuffled list of UCI strings” input is gone. Click a white piece to select it · the board highlights the piece in gold and paints a green ring on every square it can legally move to. Click a destination to commit the move; click the same piece again to deselect; click another white piece to switch selection. The UI can never let the player try an illegal move because the legal-destination set comes from the same legalMovesFor helper the solver uses. Works with mouse, touch, and keyboard (squares are now focusable buttons with Enter/Space).
• new Polymath split into four themed standalone games. The /all page no longer hides four filter modes behind a tab bar · each mode now ships as its own landing page and its own entry in the site catalogue. Math Polymath, Knowledge Polymath, Memory Polymath, and Reasoning Polymath all live alongside the full-catalogue Polymath in the Polymath section, so the five streak variants read as one cohesive group on the home page instead of being scattered across Memory / Knowledge / Numbers / Reasoning. Memory Polymath replaces the earlier Numbers variant whose pool overlapped Math too heavily · the new pool draws cleanly from pi, memory, color, and ghost. Each variant keeps its own high streak and FAQ, works offline, and plays identically apart from its themed pool.

Fixed

• fix Odd One Out fruit + shape categories no longer rely on botany / geometry edge cases. The standalone /odd-one-out game and the labyrinth’s OddOneOutEncounter both shipped emoji odd-pools that contained items belonging to the “wrong” group under a defensible reading. The fruits category mixed 🍅 (tomato), 🌽 (corn), and 🥒 (cucumber) into the “not a fruit” pool · all three are botanically fruits, so a botany-aware player could correctly identify them as belonging with the apple / banana / grape group. The squares category used 💠, 🔷, and 🔶 (diamonds) as the “not a square” pool · a diamond is mathematically a square rotated 45°, which a geometry-aware player would catch. Both pools now use unambiguous outliers: roots / tubers / bulbs / leaves / flower-heads / fungi for the not-fruit pool, and circles / triangles / stars for the not-square pool.
• fix Analogies labyrinth encounter no longer offers a defensible second answer. The labyrinth’s AnalogiesEncounter distractor pool only excluded items whose b matched the correct answer · the b from the SHOWN pair (e.g. “pup” in wolf : pup :: bear : ?) could still surface as a distractor. With the “young animal” relation containing multiple cub / pup / foal / calf entries, that left rounds where two on-screen options were colloquially correct. Encounter generation now mirrors the standalone Analogies game: pick p2 with a b distinct from p1.b, exclude both p1.b and p2.b from the distractor pool, and de-duplicate by b so the same label can never appear twice.
• fix Riddle distractors that fit the clues just as well as the answer were swapped. A second pass through the riddle pool caught four distractors with defensible alternative readings. “I have hands but cannot clap, a face but cannot smile” (cl-clock) used to list A doll and A puppet · both have literal hands and a face that don’t clap or smile. “I have cities but no houses; forests, but no trees; water, but no fish” (cl-map) used to list A globe · a globe depicts the same things without containing them, exactly like a map. “I am always coming, but never arrive” (wa-future, answer: Tomorrow) used to list The horizon · a horizon also recedes as you approach it, which makes it a defensible answer. “The more of me you take, the more you leave behind” (cl-candle, answer: Footsteps) used to list A path · walking more of a path literally leaves more of it behind you. All four swapped for distractors that cleanly fail one of the riddle’s clues.
• fix Polymath no longer strands the player on “Loading …”. A sub-module whose JS chunk failed to resolve (broken deploy, stale service worker, very slow network) could leave the Polymath shell spinning on “Loading sudokuforce…” forever with no exit. Added a 10 second timeout and a new “Try another” button that re-seeds the sub-game picker so the player can skip past a broken chunk without ending their streak. Translated across all 25 locales via the new games.all.try_another key.
• fix Chess Mate / Mastermind Deduce / Sudoku Force explainers now translate. The post-answer verdict on all three games still read as hardcoded English (“Checkmate.”, “You pinned the unique code.”, “4 is the only digit that fits.” …) even in non-English locales. Added six new i18n keys (games.chessmate.explain_won / explain_lost, games.masterminddeduce.explain_won / explain_lost, games.sudokuforce.explain_won / explain_lost) translated across all 25 locales, and wired the three explain callbacks through the locale's t().
• fix Riddles no-fail encounter dedupes across rounds + keeps the explainer. Multi-round riddle encounters (L20+) could hand the player the same riddle twice in a row when the filtered pool was narrow. The pre-computation now tracks seen ids and retries up to 4× the requested round count before falling back to a repeat. The reveal card also paints the riddle's own “why the answer works” explanation below the answer line, so the guided-tour flow keeps the educational payoff the old options mode had.
• fix Goal marker label positioning stabilised. The badge under the 🏁 glyph used position: absolute without an explicit left, so the browser fell back to auto-placement and different engines drew the label in different spots. Now pinned at left: cx; transform: translateX(-50%), which centres the badge under the flag deterministically on every engine. Marker icon + label now render as siblings instead of nested, so overflow can't clip one without the other.
• fix Preloader skips hidden labyrinth encounters. preloadAllAdapters was iterating the full ADAPTERS map after the catalog refactor, which meant it was burning bytes on Riddles / Polyglot chunks that the player would never meet in the maze. It now preloads only LABYRINTH_VISIBLE_GAME_IDS · hidden entries still load on demand via lazyAdapter.

April 23, 2026

New

• new Polymath game at /all. Cross-game streak roulette that pulls random rounds from every PlayMemorize mini-game. Five themed modes filter the pool: All (full catalogue, labyrinth excluded), Math, Knowledge, Numbers, and Reasoning. Each mode keeps its own high streak. Built on the shared ModuleStreakGame + the GameModule API: a thin MiniGame delegate dynamically loads whichever game generate() picked and forwards onWin / onFail / onAbort unchanged, so a Polymath round of Chess Mate plays byte-identically to a native Chess Mate round. Landing page, 25-locale i18n block, FAQ copy, precache entry, and a dedicated conformance test covering the mode pool references all land in the same pass.

Fixed

• fix Pi digit counter no longer desyncs on restart. "I know X digits" could show 0 even when the stored group index was mid-run, and the first three taps of a new run silently no-op'd until the player hit Reset. Root cause: stale localStorage values could push the group index past the constant's last group, and the reset path conflated learn-mode and play-mode counters. Pure helpers (parseStoredGroup clamps to [0, totalGroups-1], buildResetSnapshot preserves learn-mode taps, a new per-constant -best-taps localStorage key tracks personal bests) now back the GameCore state machine with unit-test coverage.
• fix Sequences “Descending” topic is now real. The standalone picker offered a descending filter but the dispatch table only referenced the built-in ascending generators, so selecting it silently fell back to whatever the difficulty pool produced. The generators were extracted to a pure src/components/sequences/generators.js module and the descending branch now dispatches to either a geometric divide-by-N pattern or a strict arithmetic decrease. Distractors can no longer be zero, negative, or match a value already visible in the shown prefix · the classic “81, 27, 9…” confusion is gone.
• fix Crazy Comparisons clicks register again. A stale-closure race in the auto-spin → handleSpin flow could display round N's slot text while rendering round N+1's answer buttons, so clicks validated against the wrong correctId and the game felt dead. handleSpin and handleAnswer now read the current round through a useRef so the slots and options always agree.
• fix Crazy Comparisons: slot machine now visibly spins. The 4-slot blur was silent · tones played but the text never changed. useTranslations() returns a new t function on every render, which cascaded through the memoized generator reference, and an effect keyed on [generator] fired every render · blanking slotTexts back to ['','','',''] and snapping phase back to idle faster than the 80 ms spin intervals could update them. Keyed the reset effect on the raw [lang, categoryFilter] inputs instead, so the slots blur through words again while the tick tones play.
• fix Ghost Mini-Game shows the full board during recall. The labyrinth GhostEncounter stripped the grid as soon as recall started, leaving only three choice buttons with no visible cue to which slot was empty. The recall view now keeps the original grid on screen with a 👻 placeholder where the removed emoji was, mirroring how the standalone Ghost game has always worked.
• fix Memory now opens at 6 cards. The default Memory grid dropped to 3×2 (3 pairs) so the matching mechanic is actually interesting from the first round. Larger grids remain available through the dropdown, and the labyrinth encounter's legacy pairs fallback clamps up to 3 so Memory in the maze is never a 4-card round.
• fix No more unit abbreviations in mini-games. Crazy Comparisons explainers and the Stroop timer now spell out units (“kilograms”, “square meters”, “kubikmeter”, “sekunder”…) across all 25 locales instead of kg / m³ / bare s.

Improved

• improve Riddles is now a guided no-fail “think, then peek” flow. Inside the labyrinth and every other hosted mini-game slot, Riddles now follows the same flow: the teaser shows the question with a single Reveal primary button, the reveal shows the answer under a “The answer” heading, and the module always calls onWin after the final reveal · never onFail. No more multiple-choice grading, no red/green chrome, no “The answer was” post-mortem. A new rounds param ramps with labyrinth level (L0 = 1 riddle, L20+ = 3). The standalone /riddles page still shows the options picker (it reads buildRound directly for its own streak flow). Three new i18n keys (riddles.cta.reveal, riddles.cta.done, riddles.reveal.heading) translated across all 25 locales.
• improve Visible “Mål” / “Goal” marker on the labyrinth board. The goal tile now paints a 🏁 checkered-flag glyph with a small localised text badge (Goal, Mål, 目标, Hedef, …) so the player can see the level exit from the moment the maze mounts, before they've walked close enough to fog-reveal that area. One new i18n key (labyrinth.tile.goal) translated across all 25 locales; painted in IconOverlay.tsx in its own layer so it can't collide with NPCs, items, or the help bubble.
• improve Single typed labyrinth encounter catalog. The per-level encounter pool, the adapter loaders, and the “is this game an encounter?” question now read from one source: src/components/labyrinth/encounters/catalog.ts. Each entry carries an id, a moduleId, a visibleInLabyrinth flag, and a tier (1 / 2 / 3). Flipping a game to visibleInLabyrinth: false drops it from the encounter pool without unregistering the module, so requestMiniGame() and <InlineGame> keep working. Riddles is now visibleInLabyrinth: false: the no-fail tour does not gate progression.

April 21, 2026

Improved

• improve Chess Mate, Sudoku Force and Flag a Mine now spawn as labyrinth encounters. The three games already shipped as conformance-clean GameModules (deterministic generate(params, seed), level-scaling paramsFromDifficulty(d, lvl), shared MiniGame) but were missing from the labyrinth's encounter pool. Added them to GameId & SUPPORTED_GAMES in engine/types.ts and registered three asAdapterLoader entries in the encounter ADAPTERS registry. They join the top-tier pool (level 6+) with the same level-ramped difficulty knobs their standalone pages use · no per-encounter adapter code, the unified GameModule API carries them straight through.
• improve Easy / Medium / Hard tier pickers for Chess Mate and Flag a Mine. Matches the pattern Sudoku Force already ships: a three-button row above the Start card sets the round difficulty. Chess tiers vary the candidate-move count (Easy 3 · Medium 4 · Hard 6 legal decoys). Mine tiers vary the board size & density (Easy 6×6 with 5 mines · Medium 7×7 with 10 · Hard 8×8 with 15). Each tier keeps its own high-streak in localStorage. Six new i18n keys per game × 25 locales · labels reuse each locale's Sudoku Easy/Medium/Hard translations, descriptions are translated for the top locales and fall back to English elsewhere.
• improve Game-switcher dropdown capped at 3/4 of the viewport. Lowered max-height from 80vh to 75vh on both the in-game GameHeader panel and the site-wide SiteNavStatic panel, so the dropdown never reaches all the way to the bottom edge of the screen · the remainder of the list scrolls inside the panel.
• improve Flag a Mine is now a full playable minesweeper. Click-to-reveal with classic flood-fill on zero regions, right-click or a flag-mode toggle to plant flags, a running mine counter, and a guaranteed safe opening (the largest 0-region is auto-revealed so the first move is never a blind guess). Board scales 6×6 / 7×7 / 8×8 by difficulty and mine density ramps per labyrinth level. Old "guess the one guaranteed mine" single-pick mode retired.
• improve Mastermind Deduce: column-labelled feedback grid. Past guesses render in a four-column row (Guess N · pegs · black-dot count · white-dot count) with sticky column headers that spell out In position and Color only. A down-arrow between history and choices makes the "pick the surviving code" flow obvious for first-timers. Pegs use a radial-gradient 3D look; black / white feedback dots use the classic Mastermind styling. Translated across all 25 locales.
• improve Chess Mate: algebraic rank / file labels & harder mate-in-one patterns. Board now renders inside a 10×10 grid with a-h file letters on top and bottom and 1-8 rank numbers on both sides · matches how real chess boards read. Added two new tactical compositions to the pool: a smothered mate (Nh6 → f7#) and an Arabian mate (Rh1 → h7# defended by Nf6), so the puzzle set is no longer dominated by back-rank patterns.
• improve Home page scroll no longer clips the bottom cards. .landing-container used justify-content: center with min-height: 100vh · now that the catalog has grown, flex centering pushed the first row above the scroll origin and the bottom rows became unreachable. Switched to justify-content: safe center so short pages still center vertically and tall pages scroll normally.
• improve The board stays on screen when you answer. In reveal mode the MiniGameShell no longer collapses the prompt into a big ✓/✗ · the chess position / Sudoku grid / mine board / Rush Hour layout / Mastermind log all stay rendered while a circular ✓/✗ verdict floats at the top-right corner of the prompt. Players can now compare their pick against the correct answer directly on the original board before pressing Continue.
• improve Sudoku Force: Easy / Medium / Hard tier buttons. Easy seeds a near-solved grid with a single blank (the target); Medium sprinkles ~16 extra blanks around the target; Hard leaves only the target's row, column and 3×3 block filled in, mirroring a real late-game Sudoku. Each tier keeps its own high-streak and the target's forced digit is always uniquely determined. Powered by a new TIER_PARAMS preset and a paramsOverride + preStart slot on the shared ModuleStreakGame so future games can expose tier pickers the same way.
• improve Flag a Mine is readable for kids. Hidden cells are now labelled tactile slate tiles (A, B, C, …) with a raised 3D bevel; revealed zeros render as dug brown “holes”; revealed numbers keep the classic minesweeper palette on a beige surface. On reveal the target cell shows a 💣 and a wrong pick shows a 🚩, and a new legend row spells out what hidden / dug / numbered cells mean. Three new i18n keys (legend_hidden, legend_dug, legend_num) translated across every supported locale.
• improve Chess Mate pieces are bigger and crisper. Board cells bumped from 32 px to 44 px; piece glyph size raised to 34 px. Both colours now render from the same solid-silhouette Unicode set (U+265A–F) so CSS color + a bold textShadow outline distinguishes white from black; the thin-line outlined glyphs (U+2654–9) that rendered as unreadable scribbles on several platforms are no longer used. The board also has a subtle drop-shadow and a softer border.
• improve Round-to-round transitions feel snappier. Legacy auto-advance flash trimmed from 700 ms to 420 ms in both MiniGameShell and the labyrinth ChallengeShell. Games with an explain callback are unaffected · those already advance on Continue.

Fixed

• fix Rush Hour Escape removed. The sliding-block mini-game's single-move oracle couldn't be disambiguated from a quick glance at the board · players reported that even after reading the rules it was unclear which tap did what. Pulled the game, its module, its landing pages, its 150 i18n strings, its FAQ copy, its precache entry, and its catalog row. Will revisit as a full 10-move puzzle when the shell supports multi-step encounters.
• fix Sudoku Force explainer no longer shipped an emdash. The "chained deductions" copy and the fallback-value glyph used — / '·' which slipped past the content linter because F-11 only scanned .astro / src/components. Extended the check to cover .tsx / .jsx under src/games too, so user-facing JSX prose (explainers, hints, prompts) can't regress into emdash land.
• fix Chess Mate: broken starting positions replaced. Two of the four frozen mate-in-one compositions were illegal (one started with Black already in check on White's turn; one had the winning rook move capturing the Black king itself). The pattern set was rebuilt with four verified mate-in-one positions (back-rank with pawn blockade, queen-in-corner, two-rook ladder, queen back-rank), so every round is now a legal position that resolves to exactly one mating move.
• fix Header game-switcher dropdown is now scrollable. With 26 games registered, the panel overflowed the viewport on short screens. Matched the behaviour of the language picker (max-height: 80vh; overflow-y: auto; overscroll-behavior: contain) for both the in-game GameHeader and the site-wide SiteNavStatic.
• fix Flag a Mine visual polish. Unrevealed cells now read as tactile hidden tiles (raised slate shading with letter label), revealed zeros render as clean blank cells, and revealed numbers use the classic minesweeper palette (1 blue, 2 green, 3 red, 4 navy, …). The board no longer looks like a purple name tag grid.
• fix Rush Hour Escape: clearer controls + rules. Slide buttons now describe the move as direction + cell count (Red car → 1 square) instead of raw (x,y) coordinates. The board shows a coral → exit marker on row 3 and a one-line rules tip ("The red car exits right. Slide any car along its lane if the path is clear"). Works in all 25 locales.
• fix Mastermind Deduce: in-game legend for the peg feedback. A small legend panel now explains ● = right colour + right position, ○ = right colour but wrong position, and the feedback row is rendered as actual black/white dot pegs next to the text fallback. Translated into all 25 locales.
• fix Every round of the five new games now explains itself. After picking an answer, the shell shows ✓/✗ plus a short explainer ("Queen a7 → h7 delivers mate · the black king has no legal escape", "Row already contains 5, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2 so only 4 fits here", "The revealed 1 at row 2 touches exactly one hidden cell, so that cell must be the mine", …) and a Continue button. Implemented generically via the shared MiniGameShell explain prop so any future game can opt in with a single callback.

April 20, 2026

New

• new Five new reasoning games. Chess Mate (mate-in-one picker), Sudoku Force (forced-digit Sudoku micro-puzzles), Flag a Mine (guaranteed-mine constraint deduction), Rush Hour Escape (winning-slide sliding-block puzzle, later retired), andMastermind Deduce (unique-code deduction from peg feedback). Each round is deterministic (pure generate(params, seed)) and validated by a cheat-proof oracle · evaluateMateInOne, verifyForcedNumber, verifyGuaranteedMine, isWinningSlide, verifyFinalDeduction · with no preset "correct" flag to tamper with. All five ship as GameModule entries so they double as Labyrinth encounters and inline blog embeds.

Fixed

• fix Header game-switcher dropdown no longer renders behind inline game cards. The header's backdrop-filter: blur() had created a new stacking context that trapped the dropdown below any later-painted page sibling. Header is now position: sticky; z-index: 1000; isolation: isolate, so the game-switcher panel paints above every page element (except modals).
• fix Simon Says fully translated in 11 locales. The simon.* i18n block had been left as English in Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian · 17 strings × 11 locales = 187 keys now properly translated (title, colors, players, start, round, watch, your turn, correct, game over, score, best, new high score, play again, player turn, winner, speed, idle description). Translations reuse each locale's ghost.* vocabulary where the phrase is identical (Correct!, Game over!, Score, Best, Play again, etc.) so the two games feel consistent. "Simon Says" retained as a brand name in every locale.
• fix Geography game: removed remaining Turkish place-name suffixes across 48 country files. Mechanical transform "X Dağı" → "Mount X" (~60 mountains), "X Gölü" → "Lake X" (~66 lakes), "X Rezervuarı" → "X Reservoir" (8 reservoirs). Danube renamed per country (Tuna → Donau/Dunărea/Duna/Dunav/Dunaj/Dunay depending on language). Compound names fixed by hand: Lake Büyük Ayı → Great Bear Lake, Lake Büyük Köle → Great Slave Lake, Lake Büyük Tuz → Great Salt Lake, Lake Urmiye → Lake Urmia, Lake İşkodra → Lake Skadar, Şattülarap → Shatt al-Arab, Şeria → Jordan, Trablus → Tripoli, Bingazi → Benghazi (Libya), Barselona → Barcelona (Venezuela). turkey.js correctly retains its 5 native Dağı/Gölü entries.
• fix Geography game: replaced Turkish place names that had bled into 26 country files. Capitals and major cities that had been seeded from a Turkish dataset now use the native or English exonym matching the rest of each file: Moskova → Moscow, Atina → Athína, Viyana → Wien, Varşova → Warszawa, Lahey → Den Haag, Brüksel → Brussels, Lizbon → Lisboa, Budapeşte → Budapest, Sofya → Sofia, Belgrad → Beograd, Bükreş → București, Tiflis → Tbilisi, Pekin → Beijing, Prag → Praha, Kopenhag → København, Tahran → Tehran, Bağdat → Baghdad, Meksiko → Ciudad de México, Seul → Seoul, Barselona → Barcelona, Münih → München, Küdüs → Jerusalem (+ Hayfa, Riyad, Cidde, Mekke, Medine, Halep, Şam, Trablus). Also the German rivers Ren → Rhein and Tuna → Donau, and two French rivers missing their accents Rhone → Rhône, Saone → Saône, plus Ecrins → Écrins. A systemic data-quality issue remains in the lake dataset: 27 country files still use Turkish "Gölü" (lake) in their lake names (e.g. Huron Gölü in canada.js) and many more mountain / river / secondary-city names are likely sourced from the same Turkish dataset · tracked for a separate regeneration pass.
• fix Swedish UI strings: restored missing diacritics. explore.desc and constants.desc had "pa" where Swedish needs "på" (meaning "on"), and constants.desc misspelled "Bläddra" ("browse") as "Bladddra". simon.game_over and ghost.game_over were left as the English "Game over!" · now "Spelet slut!". Fixed in src/i18n/ui.ts.
• fix Define (word meaning) no longer asks misleading "Activities vs Objects" questions. CLDR files many clearly-object emoji (paintings, medals, balls, gifts, tickets, game pieces, ski gear, kites) under its Activities group via the arts & crafts, award-medal, event, sport and game subgroups, which made puzzles like "Tavla" (Swedish for painting) correctly mark Objekt as wrong. The Define game now skips the Activities category entirely and draws from the 5 remaining categories (people & body, animals & nature, food & drink, travel & places, objects). Affects all 25 locales.

Improved

• improve Euler's Identity explainer now renders in every site language. The /learn/pi/eulers-identity component bundle gained it, tr, ro, hu, cs, el, he, th and uk locales (29 keys each · headings, constant descriptions, step labels, unit-circle copy, the Feynman quote, and the 1748 Introductio historical note). Bundle went from 17 to 25 of 25 supported locales · no more English fallback on the Euler page.
• improve Major Pincode System guide now renders in Italian. The memorise-body.json component bundle gained an it locale (97 keys · the whole write-up of the muscle-memory + Major System method, from core idea through numpad paths, the 10-rule reference, a worked example on pi's first six digits, practice guidance, and the full footer). English words that are part of the mnemonic (Mitt, Road, Lip, Tomb, Comb…) are preserved as-is · translating them would break the system. Italian is at 15 of 25 locales.

New

• new Riddles game at /riddles. Text riddles with multiple-choice answers. Pick difficulty (easy / medium / hard or all), pick a type (classic, what-am-I, wordplay, logic, math, or all), and pick how many answer choices you want to see (2–6). Each round is a deterministic pull from a themed pool: distractors are drawn from the riddle's own trap bag first, then from sibling riddles of the same type, so the choices stay topic-coherent instead of degenerating into random nouns. Endless streak mode with per-filter best score, so changing any dial starts a fresh target. Ships as a GameModule, so it doubles as a labyrinth encounter. UI strings translated into all 25 locales; riddle content itself is English-only in v1 with a documented fallback path for future locale packs.
• new Polymath category on the home page. Labyrinth moves out of the “Reasoning” group into its own top-of-page “Polymath” section · the message is now explicit: this is the gauntlet you beat to prove you're good at a bit of everything. Game-card description updated to reflect the per-level difficulty ramp.
• new Every game scales with labyrinth depth. Deeper labyrinth levels now make each game genuinely harder · more digits to memorise, more pairs to match, bigger numbers to compute, more options to tell apart · instead of level 50 playing exactly like level 5.

Improved

• improve Stop a game → Game Mode exits in the same gesture. Tapping any game's Stop button used to leave the player in distraction-free Game Mode and force a second tap on the floating Exit pill to return to the page chrome. Every game's Stop handler now dispatches a pm:game:stop event that the GameModeToggle listens for; if Game Mode is active, it deactivates immediately. Also added src/utils/gameMode.js as the cross-component event bus · React game islands and the inline Astro toggle script now talk through one documented contract.
• improve Riddles: every riddle now explains itself after you answer. All 41 riddles carry a written-out one-to-three sentence “why the answer works” that unfolds on both correct and wrong. For the classic “bat and ball” puzzle you get the algebra; for “what 9-letter word contains all five vowels in order?” you get f-A-c-E-t-I-O-U-s spelt out; for “smallest whole number equal to 7 times the sum of its digits” you get the check that n=7 and n=14 fail. Correct answers no longer auto-advance · you read the explanation and tap “Next riddle” when you're ready. The “Correct!” label, the “Next riddle” button text and the “The answer was” label are translated across all 25 locales.
• improve Labyrinth: quest-giver now hides the reward until you've heard the brief. Previously the giver's speech-bubble spelled out what they'd lost and what they'd trade, and the lost item sat visible on the map from the moment the level loaded · there was no moment of discovery. The flow is now three beats: the giver yells “Help! Help!” from their tile, walking up to them opens a pop-up with the full quest (lost glyph → reward → obstacle) and a single “Okay” button, and dismissing the pop-up is the first time the lost item becomes visible on the map. Revisits before fetching the item are silent reminders (breathing templated bubble); revisits with the item in hand still trigger the exchange and clear the giver tile. Translated into all 25 locales.
• improve Labyrinth: pi-recall memorisation now has a visible study countdown. The memorise screen shows a shrinking green→amber→red progress bar and a whole-second readout so the player knows exactly how long they have to study before the digits vanish and the numpad appears.
• improve Labyrinth: maze is tighter and the solution path longer. The generator used to braid away every dead end, which carved so many shortcuts that the route from start to goal often skipped most puzzle tiles · you could finish a level without answering more than one or two questions. It now braids only ~25% of dead ends, so the solution path stays winding. Scattered puzzle-tile density also bumped (~1/5 of eligible cells instead of ~1/8, cap 18 instead of 12), so you actually have to work your way through a gauntlet of challenges on the way up.

April 19, 2026

Fixed

• fix Game language persistence: site language now dictates game language. Starting a game in Swedish, failing, and restarting would sometimes render the new game in English · the root cause was Stroop's own language picker persisting a stroop-lang key in localStorage that could drift from the site locale. Removed the in-game picker entirely (Stroop now uses the lang prop from the URL, no exceptions), wiped the legacy key on load, pruned Geo's dead geo-lang-change/geo-lang-set event listeners so the app always reflects the URL, and taught Polyglot to reject stored target-languages that equal the site locale (you can't "learn" your own language). Polyglot's idle description and “not enough words” hint are now translated across all 25 locales instead of hardcoded English.
• fix Labyrinth pi-recall now asks for the first N digits every time. Higher-level encounters were rotating through a random 100-digit window of pi, so the player would face “…35897” or “…82097” rather than the leading digits they had actually been memorising. The “level N = know the first N digits of pi” contract is now honoured for all levels, not just 0 and 1.
• fix Labyrinth pi-recall progress counter now substitutes every placeholder. The progress line read “Type the 7 digits (0/&var(--ink);n&var(--ink);)” because the translation helper only replaced the first occurrence of a named placeholder, so the second &var(--ink);n&var(--ink); leaked through unrendered. The helper now replaces every occurrence.
• fix Labyrinth: tapping a far-away puzzle piece or the quest-giver now routes the hero there. The BFS previously refused to plot any path that crossed an uncleared encounter or question-tile, which made most long clicks silently do nothing. The router now treats only walls (and roadblocks the player doesn't have the item for) as hard blockers · givers and puzzle-tiles along the way trigger their own modal, the queue drains cleanly, and play resumes with a second tap.
• improve Labyrinth: quest speech-bubble sits above the giver and breathes. The bubble was anchored to the giver's side in a wide rectangle that often covered adjacent tiles. It now sits directly above the giver in a more compact, squarer box clamped to the grid, and fades out briefly every eight seconds so it doesn't permanently occupy the map while the player is navigating.

New

• new Game Mode: distraction-free focus mode on every game. A floating “Game Mode” pill sits at the bottom-right of every game landing page (Memory, Ghost, Polyglot, Geo, Pi, and the rest). Tapping it hides the header, sub-nav, footer and install banner, locks page scroll, and lifts the game to fill the viewport on the normal surface colour. Exit with the floating X button (same bottom-right slot as the toggle) or Escape · scroll position is preserved on exit. Game Mode is independent of gameplay: starting or losing a game never enters or exits it. Translated into all 25 locales.

Improved

• improve Analogies & Define: pool expanded from ~250 to 471 items. New high-quality pairs added across all 14 relations · more capitals (New Zealand, Israel, Pakistan, Qatar, Baltic states …), continents, young animals (tiger, giraffe, zebra, llama …), habitats (koala, octopus, mole …), tool functions (magnet, calculator, binoculars …), workplaces (firefighter, blacksmith, astronomer …), producers (composer, architect, journalist …), categories (guitar, gold, hydrogen, tulip …), antonyms, synonyms, part-whole pairs, tool users, characteristics, and degree intensifiers. Because the game generates A:B pairings combinatorially (N×(N−1) per relation), the distinct-round count grew from ~5,000 to 17,470 · players see far fewer repeats per session.
• improve Card-based games: every emoji card now sizes like Memory. Memory has always rendered emojis at 75% of a square card via Twemoji SVGs and container-query sizing. That same pattern · aspectRatio: 1, container-type: inline-size, and an <Emoji size="75%"> Twemoji · is now applied across Odd One Out (emoji puzzles), Ghost (recall grid + answer buttons), Polyglot (word-to-emoji options), and the Labyrinth Memory / Odd One Out / Polyglot / Ghost popup encounters. The shared Emoji component was extended to accept any CSS length (percent, cqi, px) for its size prop.
• improve Odd One Out: removed all letter puzzles. Single-letter rounds ("all others are consonants / vowels / letters in PLAYGROUND / in the first half of the alphabet") were effectively unsolvable for non-English speakers and ambiguous even for English speakers · a letter can legitimately belong to several rules at once. The Letters category is gone, the generators (vowels, consonants, alphabet halves, word-letter lookup) are deleted, and the difficulty pools no longer include them. FAQ copy updated to match.
• improve Odd One Out: localized category filter. The "All / Emoji / Numbers / Shapes / Math" picker on the idle screen now renders in every UI language instead of hardcoded English, and your choice persists between sessions like the difficulty picker.

Fixed

• fix Labyrinth: every level now actually requires the quest. The maze generator carves a perfect (single-path) maze and then braids it to break up long dead ends · but braiding occasionally opened an alternate route around the roadblock, so the player could reach the goal without delivering the ring or picking up the right item. The roadblock cell is now verified to be a real bridge between start and goal (removing it must disconnect them); if it isn't, the generator slides it along the solution path, falls back to a whole-maze bridge scan, or re-seeds. Verified across 3,000 (level × seed) combinations with zero bypasses.
• fix Labyrinth: player no longer spawns next to a puzzle piece. Question tiles were placed anywhere on the walkable grid, so on some seeds a puzzle sat one step (or zero) from the start and the player opened a puzzle modal before they'd even moved. Placement now excludes every cell within BFS distance 4 of the start · the first few steps are always free so the player can orient.
• fix Labyrinth: quest-giver's speech bubble stays visible. The bubble used to fade in and out on a 5s loop, so when a player walked onto the NPC during the "invisible" window the quest looked like nothing had happened. It now bounces in once on level start and stays pinned above the giver until the ring is delivered.
• fix Labyrinth: tapping a puzzle piece behind another puzzle now walks you there. The click-to-walk BFS treated every uncleared obstacle as impassable, so if another puzzle sat between the player and the tapped one, nothing happened. When the tap target is itself a puzzle, other puzzles are now passable as intermediates · you walk to the first puzzle, solve it (the queue drains on phase change), then tap again to continue.
• fix Labyrinth: Analogies encounter no longer shows English words in non-English UIs. The analogies relation pool only ships English for v1; every other locale fell back to it, producing "Swenglish" rounds (Swedish rule label, English option words). Analogies are now excluded from the maze's encounter pool for any locale without a translated pool · affected players see other encounter types instead until localised analogy pools land.

Improved

• improve Define: cross-category ambiguity filter plus Cyrillic 3-char handling. A third quality pass drops any word whose string contains a token from any other surviving category's label, not just its own · catches real compound-semantic overlaps like Swedish "Skaldjursspett" (contains djur = animal), German "Feuerwerkskörper" (contains körper = body), Italian "Cercapersone" (contains persone = people), Romanian "Scorpion" (contains corp), and German "Torte" (contains orte = places). The language-class minimum-token length was also lowered to 3 for Russian and Ukrainian so Cyrillic 3-char food tokens (еда, їжа) are recognised · five Russian medal words and the Ukrainian hedgehog no longer slip past the filter.

April 18, 2026

Improved

• improve Backwards: distractors are now misspellings of the same word. Rounds used to mix the correct reversal with reverses of three unrelated words · easy to spot because only one "looked right". Every option now comes from the same word, differing only by letter swaps or substitutions, so players actually have to verify the reversal character-by-character. Works in all 25 languages · swaps operate on Unicode code points, preserving combining marks and CJK characters.
• improve Define: dropped self-explanatory word categories, expanded the pool. The Flags, Smileys & emotion, and Symbols emoji categories produced trivial rounds where the word itself gave the category away (e.g. "Flag: Comoros" under a "Flags" label). All three are now excluded. The country-to-continent pool grew from ~53 to ~90 countries across every locale, and the English analogies pool gained ~45 new items (more capitals, young animals, habitats, workplaces, tool functions, categories, antonyms, synonyms).
• improve Define: recursive scan across all 25 languages, plus analogy-pair filter. A second pass caught 72 more self-explanatory words where a word contained a token from its category label · "Canned food" under "Food & drink", "Matlagning" under "Mat & dryck", "Hot drink", "Pot of food", "Cooking food", etc. The filter now tokenises compound labels, drops language connectives / articles (and, or, the, les, और, और, 및, …), and lowers the minimum-token-length for compound-heavy Swedish and CJK scripts so short root words like "mat" (food) still register. On the analogies side, pairs where the question word trivially gives the answer away ("pig" → "piglet", "baker" → "bakery", "Mexico" → "Mexico City", 11 total) are now hidden from Define while remaining available to the Analogies game (where the a₁:b₁ :: a₂:b? format obscures the giveaway). Another ~20 good analogy items added to keep the pool deep after the filter.

Fixed

• fix Define: equal coverage across all 25 languages. Non-English locales were falling back to the English-only analogies pool, so Swedish / French / Japanese players saw English option words like "doctor" or "astronomer" under localised rule labels. Non-English rounds now draw only from fully-localised sources · the 1,400-word CLDR emoji vocabulary and a new country-to-continent pool resolved natively via Intl.DisplayNames.
• fix Define: question word could appear as a wrong answer. On the synonym / antonym relations the distractor loop didn't exclude the prompt word itself, so the very word being asked about could show up as an option labelled "wrong". Both buckets are now filtered.

New

• new Define: country-to-continent rounds in every language. A new source built on Intl.DisplayNames with UN M.49 region codes adds ~60 countries × 5 continents, rendered natively in the player's locale. No translation tables · every one of the 25 site locales gets the same variety.

Improved

• improve Game pages: merged "About this page" and "FAQ" into a single collapsible. Every game landing now has one "About this page & FAQ" accordion at the bottom instead of two separate ones, so readers don't have to open two toggles to see the full SEO footer content.
• improve Stroop: in-game language picker. Choose the display language for the color words (25 locales) directly from the idle panel, independent of the site locale. Your choice is saved locally, so a Swede can practice on `blå/röd/grön` even while browsing an English URL.
• improve Ghost: memorize time no longer shrinks as you advance. The game was already hard enough · round decay is gone, so memorize time depends only on grid size and tempo. The selected tempo (Slow / Normal / Fast) determines the pace for the whole session.

New

• new Define · a new vocabulary game at /define. See a word, pick its meaning from 2-6 options. Rounds are generated combinatorially from two shared pools · the Unicode CLDR emoji category vocabulary (fully localised in all 25 languages) and a hand-curated pool of 14 semantic relations (capital-of, young-of, antonym, synonym, habitat, function, part-whole, and more). Distractors are always other correct members of the same category or relation, never random words. Define is also wired into the Labyrinth mini-game pool from level 3 upward.
• new Backwards game at /backwards. See a word, pick it spelled backwards from the list before the millisecond timer catches up. DOG → GOD, BEAR → RAEB. Ships in all 25 languages, drawing its word pool from the same Unicode CLDR source as Memory and Polyglot, and also appears as a Labyrinth encounter from tier 2 onwards. Best streak and fastest reaction time saved per difficulty.
• new New Learn pages. Short "how it works and why it helps" guides now sit alongside the games · the first cover Memory, Pi, Geography and Ghost.
• new Reasoning games now show reaction time. Matrix, Odd One Out, Spatial, and Analogies now measure per-round reaction time in milliseconds (matching the pattern from Stroop). Each correct answer shows your response time, and your fastest-ever answer per difficulty is saved locally and shown on the game-over screen.
• new Labyrinth: scattered ❓ challenge tiles. Every level now sprinkles question-mark tiles across the maze. Walking onto one opens a short mini-game picked from the level's encounter pool. Each tile's question is pinned to its coordinates · re-visiting the same tile asks the same question, so memory pays off. Cleared tiles turn back into plain path.
• new Labyrinth: soft-fail teleport. Answering a challenge wrong (or abandoning it) no longer drops you a level. You're teleported back to the level's start instead, keeping every tile you've already cleared and every item you've picked up. Retry by walking back.

Fixed

• fix Header drop-down and footer on the home page. The home page was missing SiteFooter, which is where the nav drop-down's toggle script lives · so the "Reasoning / Memory / Words …" menu wouldn't open and the footer itself was absent. Labyrinth now shows in the drop-down under Reasoning on every page including Home.
• fix Polyglot encounter prompt now names the language. The prompt previously just said “Foreign word” with the word and no language context, which was confusing when the word (e.g. “casa”) exists in multiple Romance languages. Prompts now lead with “Spanish word” / “French word” / “German word” / “Italian word” above the word itself, and the hint reads “Pick the emoji this &var(--ink);language&var(--ink); word means.” Analogies also switched from “A : B :: C : ?” notation to plain English (“A is to B as C is to ?”) with an explicit hint.

Improved

• improve Labyrinth: full three-beat quest chain with a visible pickup. Every level now lays out the whole quest on the map: quest-giver (mini-game) → the ring you fetch (tool pickup on the solution path) → the obstacle (hole / fire / wall / door). The perfect-maze property forces the order · you can't reach the pickup without beating the giver and you can't reach the goal without using the pickup on the obstacle. Winning the mini-game no longer silently hands you the tool; you have to go get it. Player glyph changed from a neutral person to a 🦸 hero. Quest-givers now show a pulsing “Help!” speech bubble above the tile so they're easy to spot when a new level appears.
• improve Labyrinth: smaller 12×12 grid, tighter top layout. Grid dropped from 24×30 to 12×12 cells so every emoji tile is twice as large and legible on a phone. The top of the page was also too busy · the subtitle paragraph is gone, the hero title is compact, and the level title / HUD row is tighter, so the maze sits near the top of the viewport. Smaller grid also eliminates the long horizontal black stripes that sometimes formed on bigger mazes (long even-row wall runs with subpixel rounding).
• improve Labyrinth: thin walls, open exit, emoji player. Walls are now thin black lines between big walkable cells (alternating 1fr / 5fr grid template), the goal is an empty opening in the top wall above a blank cell (no more emoji on the goal tile), and the player is a 🧑 twemoji sized to fill the cell. The board stretches to fill the viewport width almost edge-to-edge; the page container opens up to 1100px so the maze breathes on desktop too.
• improve Labyrinth: bigger map, full-view, homepage header. Grid jumps to 24×30 cells (taller than wide so it fits portrait mobile without scrolling). Fog of war is gone · the entire maze is visible up front. Walls are solid black, paths are white, every feature tile (quest-giver, obstacle, goal) renders its twemoji glyph at all times so the run reads like a classic hand-drawn labyrinth. The home page now uses the same shared GameHeader as every other page for consistent navigation.
• improve Labyrinth now has a Diablo 2 quest flavour. Each level opens with a named locale (The Blood Moor, Cold Plains, Stony Field … sixteen in total) and a one-line quest subtitle (“Quest · Descend the pit”) that flashes above the board and fades out. Palette switched from paper to torchlight: warm parchment where the light reaches, dim tan at the fog edge, near-black void beyond, dark iron walls, gold-trimmed frame. Quest-givers rotate through twelve robed glyphs and the goal tile rotates through twelve destinations (waygate, shrine, tome, portal, crown …) so repeating a level twice is visually distinct. Player marker is a warm red orb with a soft torch halo.
• improve Labyrinth redesigned as a classic paper-maze. Fixed 12×12 cell grid, white paths with crisp black walls, start at the bottom, goal at the top · no instructions, no tutorial, no toasts, no legend. The player figures it out by moving. Fog now reveals only the cell you stand on and the four walkable neighbours, one step deep in each direction; no trail, no memory · you navigate by the light in front of you.
• improve Labyrinth quest structure. Each level is now a small story: walk into the 🧙 quest-giver on the solution path, beat their short mini-game, collect the item they hand you (🪢 rope / 🪣 bucket / 🪜 ladder / 🗝 key), then use it to clear the one roadblock (🕳 hole / 🔥 fire / 🧱 wall-block / 🚪 door) blocking your way to the goal. Replaces the previous multi-encounter layout with a single self-explanatory chain.
• improve Silent level transitions. Reaching the goal auto-advances; failing the challenge auto-drops a level. The maze simply changes; there is no celebration or failure screen in the way.
• improve Removed the Labyrinth tutorial, onboarding coach-marks, event flashes, toasts, in-game settings drawer, legend, and save-code entry form. All of it: gone. Roughly −1k lines of UI chrome and three dead files so new work is cheaper to reason about.

New

• new Labyrinth. A fog-of-war maze game and the new front-page hero. Walk a top-down grid, see only adjacent tiles, beat short challenges drawn from 13 of the existing mini-games (encounters), and climb level by level. Deterministic maze generation: every level is fully reproducible from a short retro save code like LVL15-X9B2QK4-7. No accounts, no email; bookmark or paste the code to resume any time. Failing an encounter drops you one level back to the same maze you cleared on the way up · spatial memory pays off.
• new Items & roadblocks (L1+). Every level above the floor has a second route to the goal, gated by a thematic obstacle (🕳 hole / 🔥 fire / 🧱 wall-block / 🚪 door). The matching item (🪢 rope / 🪣 bucket / 🪜 ladder / 🗝 key) is hidden elsewhere on the maze. Strategic choice each level: take the long encounter-laden main path, or detour to grab the item and use the shortcut.
• new Pi & Color encounters scale to your level. Reach level 15? You must recall 15 digits of pi or repeat 15 colours in a row. The challenge length is your level number, capped at 100 (pi) and 16 (color).
• new Onboarding tutorial. First-time visitors get a guided 5x5 walk-through of movement, fog of war, encounters, drop-down failure, and the save-code system. Returning players skip straight to play; "Replay tutorial" is in the in-game settings.
• new Animated retro fog. Fogged tiles render with three drifting cloud puffs that pulse softly, each with a per-tile phase so the board never breathes in lockstep. Honours prefers-reduced-motion.
• new Facts game at /facts. Spot the one true statement among several. Statements are generated on the fly from a pool of schemas (primes, perfect squares, divisibility, arithmetic, month lengths, country flags) so there are no hand-written questions to run out of. Country names resolve via Intl.DisplayNames and month names via Intl.DateTimeFormat, so the game speaks all 25 site locales natively without a translated question bank.
• new Emoji mode for Analogies. Toggle between word and emoji analogies on the /analogies landing. Emoji puzzles pair symbols like cow:milk :: chicken:egg, rendered with Twemoji so they look identical on every device.
• new Multilingual parity across Memory, Ghost, Polyglot, Convert, and Pi. Memory, Ghost, and Polyglot now ship emoji labels for all 25 site locales by sourcing names from CLDR annotations (previously 14 locales, the rest fell back to English). Convert's 11 categories and ~90 unit names are i18n-keyed. Pi's 38 constant names and descriptions are i18n-keyed via a new getConstantMeta(slug, t) helper.

Improved

• improve Home page. Now leads with the playable Labyrinth above the fold; the existing 14-game grid is below in a "Browse the practice games" collapsible. The dedicated /labyrinth page also exists for direct linking.
• improve Mobile controls. Four-arrow horizontal D-pad below the board, plus swipe-on-board input for the maze itself. Pointerdown for instant tap response with active-state colour feedback.
• improve Matrix game is significantly harder. Medium now starts at 2 rules (ramping to 4), Hard starts at 3 and ramps to 4, and Easy ramps from 1 to 2 as streak grows.
• improve Analogies is now truly infinite. Rewrote the data layer from 64 hand-written A:B::C:D rows into 14 relations × ~12-35 items (country→capital, animal→young, tool→function, antonyms, continents, part-whole, and 8 more). Each round picks a relation and two random pairs from it, so the puzzle space is thousands of combinations instead of 64. Distractors are now drawn from the same relation's other b-values, so wrong options stay on-topic (a capital question offers other capitals, not random words like "Gale" or "Huge").
• improve Removed the Difficulty picker from Memory, Color (Simon), Ghost, Geography, Polyglot, Math, Converter, Crazy Comparisons, Analogies, and Stroop. Players had no reliable intuition for what easy/medium/hard meant per game, and per-difficulty high-score keys fragmented personal bests. Each game's underlying behaviour is pinned to the old "medium" defaults (or a sensible replacement: Geo Top-N = 10, Simon base tempo, Math ±30% distractor range, Converter plausibility spread, Polyglot same-category distractors). A one-shot migration on each game collapses any legacy per-difficulty high scores into the unified key so players keep their bests.
• improve Hot streak badge now renders inline inside the game header next to the logo and game switcher, instead of floating fixed in the top-right corner. Also shown inline with the logo on the home page.
• improve Shared matching engine under src/lib/matching-engine/: generator-driven rounds, sliding anti-repeat window, magnitude distractor helper, and locale-aware compact number formatting. Crazy Comparisons is the first game migrated to it; other matching games will follow.
• improve Crazy Comparisons data model is now language-neutral: numeric facts live in src/data/crazy-comparisons/facts.js and all display text routes through the site-wide src/i18n/ui.ts under comparisons.* keys (25-locale parity). 25 hand-maintained per-locale question files were removed, so numeric fixes no longer need to be applied in 25 places.

Fixed

• fix Facts: February/29-days ambiguity. The lie generator could produce "February has 29 days" - true in leap years - as a supposedly false statement. 29 is now excluded from month-length distractors so every claim is unambiguous.
• fix Facts: round-level uniqueness for months and flags. In small-pool categories (Calendar, Geography) a round could contain two statements about the same month ("March has 31 days" vs "March has 30 days") or reuse a country's flag as a lie for another country's name, letting players solve by elimination instead of by knowledge. Generators now track used months / countries and avoid repeating.
• fix Facts: high score now saved when you press STOP (not only on a wrong answer), so ending a long streak manually no longer discards the best.
• fix Facts: NaN-safe state initialisation. Corrupted localStorage values for answer count or high score used to render the game unplayable; parsing now falls back to defaults on any non-finite input.
• fix Facts: honours prefers-reduced-motion. The correct-answer scale animation and 150 ms transitions are disabled for users who have asked the OS for reduced motion.
• fix Facts: copy no longer claims "out of four" since 2-6 answers are selectable. Landing description, noscript, FAQ and home-page card all updated across all 25 locales.
• fix UI: game.category label translated into 24 non-English locales (was hard-coded "Category" everywhere). Used by the Facts and other games' category picker.
• fix Memory cards wouldn't flip. A Start overlay sat on top of the grid and swallowed taps, so first-time players tapping cards saw nothing happen. Removed the gate · cards are clickable immediately and the timer starts on the first flip, like a classic memory game.
• fix Analogies repeating questions. With the old 64-question pool and pure-random picking, duplicates started appearing within ~10 rounds (birthday paradox). The new combinatorial engine plus a recent-seen buffer on item ids means the same pair won't resurface for at least ~20 rounds.
• fix Odd One Out: ambiguous puzzles eliminated. A puzzle like [8, 21, 2, 4] with the answer "4 (only non-Fibonacci)" was broken because 21 is also the only odd number / only non-power-of-2, and 2 is the only prime - multiple defensible answers. A validator now rejects any puzzle where a non-target item is also a unique outlier under common rules (parity, primality, squares, cubes, powers of 2, Fibonacci, multiples of 3/4/5, digit count). The Fibonacci, prime, square, cube, and powers-of-2 generators were also tightened to drop multi-distinctive items (1, 2, 8, 144) that overlapped across categories.
• fix Odd One Out: math addition generator infinite loop. When the random target landed at 10 or below, the generator looped forever trying to produce 10 unique a + b = target pairs from a pool smaller than 10. Target range now starts at 11 so the loop is always satisfiable.
• fix Odd One Out: retry-budget fallback. When the validator exhausted its 80 retry attempts (extremely rare), the old code returned the last rejected puzzle - defeating the validator. The fallback now generates an emoji/shape puzzle instead (unambiguous by construction) so a user is never shown an ambiguous puzzle, even in the worst case.
• fix Matrix answer options no longer look identical. Previously distractors could differ from the answer only in size/fill/rotation, producing choice tiles that were visually indistinguishable (e.g. three "blue +++" options at different sizes). Every option now has a unique (shape, color, count) tuple, so distinctions are always obvious at a glance.
• fix Matrix high score is now saved when you press STOP (and on every correct answer), not only on a wrong answer. Players ending a long streak manually no longer lose their best.
• fix Matrix rotation rules removed. Circle, square, diamond and cross are 4-fold symmetric, so rotation patterns were invisible for half the shape pool and made puzzles unsolvable when they fired.
• fix Matrix double-tap race. A rapid second tap between the click and the next render could slip past the play-phase guard and register two answers for one puzzle. Fixed with a synchronous ref lock.
• fix Matrix "new high" false positive. The end-of-run screen showed the trophy and "New high score!" whenever round >= highScore, which also fires on a tie with the previous best. Now only shows when the run genuinely beat the saved high.
• fix Memory game render loop. ALL_CAT was rebuilt every render, invalidating buildDeck's useCallback, re-firing the build effect, calling setCards again · an infinite setState loop at ~28k mutations/sec. Wrapped ALL_CAT and category in useMemo. No more runaway rerenders; the flip handler now commits state reliably.

April 17, 2026

New

• new Hot streak site-wide. A flame badge in the top-right tracks days in a row. Play any game once a day to keep the streak going; miss a day and it resets. Click the badge for your personal best and how it works. Localised across all 25 languages.

Fixed

• fix Polyglot high-score key mismatch. Initial high-score read used a key without categoryId, while writes (and the post-mount sync effect) used a key that included it. The inconsistency caused the best-streak badge to briefly show 0 on first render.
• fix BlogPost schema.org author. Blog post sameAs hardcoded the X/Twitter URL instead of reading AUTHOR_TWITTER from constants.ts, so any future handle change would have left blog schema out of date.
• fix Emdash in install banner. The iOS "Add to Home Screen" banner's subtitle contained an emdash (slipped past verify because it's assigned inside a script block). Replaced with a middot per F-01 style.

Improved

• improve Stroop game is harder and deeper: answer buttons no longer show a matching color dot (that shortcut bypassed the interference), and a new Mode setting adds a reverse variant where you read the word instead of naming the ink. High score and fastest time are tracked per mode so the easier reverse variant no longer masks your Normal-mode best, and the idle description swaps to match the selected mode.
• improve Games grouped by family. Home page and the game switcher dropdown now cluster games under Memory, Knowledge, Numbers, and Reasoning headings instead of showing one flat list. Each entry in src/lib/games.ts gained a group field; GAME_GROUPS drives the display order.
• improve Removed N-back game. The /nback landing and all locale variants are gone, along with its registry entry, FAQ copy, service-worker precache slot, and translation keys across all 25 locales.
• improve Accessibility in quiz games. Memory game dropdowns are now proper <button> elements with aria-haspopup / aria-expanded and Escape-to-close. Polyglot, Analogies, and Matrix gain role="group" on their answer sets; Polyglot answer buttons expose the target word via aria-label (screen readers can now read emoji-only options); Analogies announces the rule via role="status"; Matrix labels the pattern grid and answer options.
• improve Install banner load. The home-screen install banner icon uses loading="lazy" and decoding="async", so it no longer competes with above-the-fold content on first paint.
• improve First-time player onboarding. Pi and Geography games now show a short how-to-play banner when a new user lands on them, so it's clear what to tap and why.
• improve Geo intro text localised across all 25 locales (previously the map loaded with a raw question and no context).

New

• new Difficulty settings on every game (except Pi). Added Easy/Medium/Hard pickers to Analogies, Polyglot, Converter, Crazy Comparisons, Stroop, Geo, Memory, Ghost, Math, and Simon. Each setting tunes the game in a sensible way: distractor closeness (Converter, Polyglot, Analogies, Math), option count (Crazy Comparisons, Ghost), congruent-word rate (Stroop), top-N depth (Geo, 5/10/20), sequence tempo (Simon), and preset grid size (Memory). High scores are now segmented by difficulty so a streak on hard stays separate from one on easy. Difficulty labels localize across all 25 site locales.
• new Install to Home Screen prompt with "Play on your next flight - works offline" pitch. Android/Chromium captures beforeinstallprompt; iOS Safari users see Share → Add to Home Screen instructions. Dismissals are remembered for 30 days.
• new Verbal Analogies game at /analogies - complete word-pair analogies across function, location, part-whole, cause-effect, synonyms, antonyms and more.
• new Stroop Test game at /stroop - the classic color-word interference test. Pick the ink color while ignoring what the word says. Measures reaction time.

Improved

• improve Service worker pre-cache now covers every game landing (was 9/13). The offline "play on your next flight" promise now holds for Sequences, Matrix, Odd One Out, and Spatial too.
• improve manifest.json adds display_override, prefer_related_applications, lang, and dir. Description now leads with offline / flight use case.
• improve Analogies / Stroop localized: all interface strings and Stroop color words (RED/BLUE/GREEN...) now translate per locale. Stroop color words are shown in the player's language so the interference effect actually works; analogy content sits in a locale-keyed data file ready to grow beyond English.

Fixed

• fix Blank page on return to browser (iOS Safari). Tabs restored from the back-forward cache with a service worker registered occasionally came back visually empty. Base.astro now reloads on pageshow/visibilitychange when the main element measures zero height, so the content recovers instead of showing an empty viewport.
• fix Odd One Out: the game could get stuck on the correct-answer screen without advancing. Auto-advance is now scheduled via a useEffect keyed on phase === 'correct', removing a stale-ref race that could swallow the timer between rounds.
• fix Sitemap: URLs now use the correct {'/{game}/{locale}'} ordering (matching canonical URLs) instead of {'/{locale}/{game}'}, and game prefixes are auto-discovered from games.ts so new games appear in sitemap.xml automatically. Previously all non-EN game locale variants were absent from the sitemap.
• fix Browser-language auto-redirect in Base.astro had a hardcoded 4-prefix list (/color /memory /geo /pi) so the redirect silently skipped 12 of 16 games. Now injects GAME_PREFIXES from games.ts at build time.
• fix Game page copy accuracy in game-faqs.ts: Memory grids (6×10 max, not 8×8), Convert categories (11, not 8), Polyglot languages list (added English; FAQ now reflects actual 14 supported languages), Math operations (now mentions squares and square roots).
• fix Copy accuracy (round 2): Color Memory (added missing 24-color option to meta descriptions + FAQ); Memory (claimed 10 fictional categories incl. "medical", corrected to the actual 9 Unicode categories); Matrix (claimed 5 shapes, there are 8); Sequences (claimed 8 pattern types, code has 14); Polyglot (removed false "spaced repetition" FAQ - the game uses random shuffle); Analogies (removed false "progressive difficulty" claim - the pool is flat).
• fix Matrix half-fill rendering. SVG shapes (hexagon, star, cross, arrow, triangle) rendered the "half" fill as a uniformly 50%-opaque shape while div-based shapes (circle, square, diamond) rendered it as a crisp left-colored / right-transparent split. Players could see a "correct" answer that looked like it did not match its row. All shapes now use the same left-half-filled rendering, and triangle is now an SVG polygon for consistency.

April 16, 2026

New

• new Number Sequences game at /sequences - find the next number in arithmetic, geometric, Fibonacci, prime, and other sequences.
• new Matrix Reasoning game at /matrix - Raven's Progressive Matrices style pattern completion with shapes, colors, and sizes.
• new Odd One Out game at /odd-one-out - spot the item that doesn't belong across numbers, emojis, letters, shapes, and math expressions.
• new Spatial Rotation game at /spatial - find the rotated match among mirrored distractors. Trains mental rotation ability.

Improved

• improve Uniform game UI all game selection controls (difficulty, topic, category, answers) now use shared dropdown components. Selectors appear above the start box for a consistent layout across all 11 games.
• improve Shared GameControls new GameSelect and IdlePanel components in src/components/game/GameControls.jsx replace per-game inline button groups with uniform dropdowns and start boxes.
• improve Per-game theme colors each game's Start button now uses its registry theme color from games.ts instead of a generic blue.
• improve All games now show a one-sentence explanation of the game while the Start button is visible, so new players know what to do.
• improve Sequences, Matrix, Spatial, Odd One Out now have configurable difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard) and answer count selectors.
• improve Sequences added topic selector to practice specific sequence types (arithmetic, geometric, Fibonacci, primes, powers, triangular).
• improve Odd One Out added category selector (emoji, numbers, letters, shapes, math) so players can focus on specific puzzle types.
• improve All games now display translated UI strings for non-English users (stop button, settings, round counter, etc.).
• improve Ghost game wrong-answer screen now shows answer options with green/red highlighting and highlights the removed emoji in the grid, so you can see what you picked vs the correct answer.
• improve Polyglot game category selector replaced with a compact dropdown instead of a row of buttons.
• improve Design system added semantic color aliases, spacing scale, type scale and shadow scale as CSS custom properties in global.css. Site-wide visual changes now require editing one file.
• improve Button system added .btn base class with --primary, --secondary, --ghost, --danger, --success variants and --sm/--lg/--block modifiers. Replaces ad-hoc inline button styles.
• improve Game registry now carries a theme object per game. Adding a new game auto-themes its landing card with no CSS edits needed.
• fix Canonical URLs normalized across all 7 game landing pages to match the site's trailingSlash: 'never' policy and sitemap.
• fix Crazy Comparisons title trimmed from 62 to 55 characters and normalised double spaces.

Fixed

• fix Odd One Out expanded all item pools to support 10 answer choices: powers-of-2 (added 256-1024), cubes (added 216-1000), all 12 emoji groups, letter generators (longer words: PLAYGROUND, KEYBOARDS, BIRTHDAYS, SOMETHING). Depth fallback no longer silently resets answer count.
• fix Spatial added safety guard to polyomino generation preventing rare infinite loops.
• fix Odd One Out removed font-dependent letter classifications (curved/straight, symmetry, enclosed spaces) and replaced with unambiguous rules (vowels/consonants, alphabet halves, letters in words).
• fix Simon Says color flashes no longer disappear at 300% speed. Fixed timing overlap where the off-timer from one flash killed the next flash's visual.
• fix Simon Says audio now pre-scheduled via Web Audio clock instead of setTimeout callbacks, fixing silent playback on iOS after speed changes.
• fix Crazy Comparisons correct-answer celebration tone now reliable on iOS (was using nested setTimeout).
• fix All games Play Again buttons now use each game's theme color instead of generic blue, matching the Start button for visual consistency.
• fix Polyglot dropdown selectors now use the shared gameSelectStyle with custom arrow, matching all other games.
• fix Math removed empty in-game settings panel that opened to show nothing.
• fix Site-wide internal links all 170,475 internal links across 5,811 pages now resolve correctly. Build-time link checker enforces zero broken links going forward.
• fix Geo blog Indonesian articles had inverted /{lang}/geo/ path · fixed across all 176 articles to /geo/{lang}/.
• fix Geo SEO footer "Blog" and "Privacy" links now point to global routes rather than non-existent /geo/{lang}/blog.
• fix Constants page cards now link to the new blog "What is X?" articles (which exist) instead of legacy /pi/{slug} hub URLs.
• fix Pi hub page primary "Play" CTA now goes to /pi directly (was broken /pi/pi/play).
• fix Major system component step-list links now respect the active locale, no longer producing broken English-only URLs in non-English builds.
• fix Memorise CTA button on the localized memorise pages now points to the global blog article (which exists).
• fix Language switcher EN-only learn pages now fall back to home for unsupported locales instead of emitting 404 links.
• fix Geo game "Study" blog link now uses site-wide /blog/ path instead of broken /geo/blog/ path, and only appears when the article actually exists for the current locale.

April 15, 2026

New

• new Unit Converter game at /convert with 11 categories (Length, Weight, Volume, Temperature, Area, Speed, Time, Digital Storage, Pressure, Energy, Fuel Economy). Includes both a converter tool and a quiz-style game mode.
• new Ghost and Polyglot blog articles in 25 languages with full color-box styling and memory technique guides.
• new /about page with author photo, bio, game grid, and design principles.
• new /accessibility page detailing WCAG compliance and accessibility features.
• new /changelog page (this page) for tracking all site updates.
• new FAQ sections on all game pages.
• new Author bylines on all blog posts with photo, name linking to /about, and localized dates.

Improved

• improve Landing page uses 4x2 CSS grid on desktop for consistent card sizing and centering. Game cards wrap and center properly on desktop.
• improve Unit Converter formula explanations and question text now use full unit names instead of abbreviations ("500 Milliseconds" vs "500 ms"). Mobile-first stacked layout with category dropdown.
• improve About blog article in cs, pl, hu, ro, tr, nl now has proper Unicode characters.
• improve Memory blog articles in all 24 non-English languages now have full color-box styling (tip-box, warn-box, key-point, strategy-card, step-badge).
• improve Geo blog Swedish cities article now available in all 25 languages (added cs, el, he, hu, it, nl, pl, ro, th, tr, uk).
• improve Math game operation buttons and settings now centered to match other games.
• improve Footer link labels now fully translated via i18n in all 25 languages. Copyright uses AUTHOR constant. Footer now includes About link, LinkedIn/X social links, and copyright notice.
• improve Blog bylines use AUTHOR constant and i18n for "Back to blog" text across all locales.
• improve Blog index game labels now come from the centralized game registry instead of hardcoded strings.
• improve No more scientific notation anywhere. Large/small numbers displayed in full decimal with commas.
• improve No emdashes anywhere on the site. Replaced with middots for cleaner display.

Fixed

• fix Language selector on English-only pages (About, Changelog, Accessibility) no longer produces broken URLs. Redirects to locale home instead.
• fix Distractor generation for extreme values (electronvolts, very small/large numbers) now stays in the correct order of magnitude.
• fix Zero-answer edge case in converter game no longer causes infinite loop.

April 14, 2026

New

• new Speed Math game at /math with configurable operations, number ranges, and difficulty.
• new Twemoji Ghost game (Kim's Game) at /ghost with 2-40 emoji grids, adjustable tempo, and smart distractors.
• new Twemoji Polyglot game at /polyglot supporting 14 languages with emoji-word association.
• new "Why I Built PlayMemorize" article published in 25 languages.
• new Memory blog articles with cognitive science techniques in 25 languages.
• new Pi blog posts for all 24 non-English languages.
• new Unified blog at /blog aggregating articles from all games.
• new Offline mode with service worker, install prompt, and PWA manifest.
• new 24-color mode for Color Memory game.
• new Auto-detect browser language and set locale defaults.

Improved

• improve SEO: canonical URLs, schema.org markup, meta descriptions, and sitemap across all pages.
• improve Consistent schema across all localized game pages.
• improve Uniform header design across all games with dark menu background.
• improve In-game settings collapsible on all games to reduce visual clutter.
• improve Ghost: preload all emoji SVGs before showing grid to prevent flicker.
• improve Polyglot: all languages loaded from emoji data, bigger emojis, portrait-friendly grids.
• improve SEO "About this page" sections added to all game pages.
• improve Human Timer: enhanced CAPTCHA with visual noise, jitter, and variable weights to improve robot-resistance.

Fixed

• fix Memory game: fixed card flip dependency causing missed clicks.
• fix Ghost: capped cell size and scaled grid to fit mobile screens.
• fix Polyglot: fixed crash on language switch and emoji sizing issues.
• fix Timer leaks and React performance issues across all games.
• fix Broken links, header layout, and excess spacing throughout.
• fix Color game: speed always starts at 100% now.