What’s new

The tutorial’s board was cut off along its top edge. The Back and Next buttons were taking their height from the board as well as from the clues, while the board was still sizing itself against the whole screen — so it drew itself larger than the room it actually had. The buttons now sit inside the clue panel, which has space to spare during the tutorial.

The tutorial’s pointing arrow escaped its speech bubble on the steps whose instruction appears beside the clues. It drifted nearly off the screen, and sometimes ended up behind whatever it landed on.

A speech bubble’s tail could sit over a rounded corner rather than against a straight edge, leaving a sliver of daylight between the tail and the bubble it belonged to.

Tutorial speech bubbles scale with the board. On a tablet the board is half again the size of a phone’s, and the bubbles beside it were staying phone-sized — which left the one thing you were meant to be reading as the smallest thing on the screen.

Switching orientation from the options screen mid-game left the clue panel squeezed against the edge of the screen, sometimes half off it. Leaving the game and coming back put it right, starting a new game did not. 1.7.38 claimed this one and missed; this time the layout was measured on a phone rather than guessed at, and the numbers pointed straight at it.

The clue panel is wider in landscape. The board is square, and on most phones held sideways it is the height that limits how big it can be — so half the screen was more than it needed and the difference was doing nothing. The clues get it now.

The pause menu no longer steps sideways as it opens on phones with a camera cut into the screen.

The clue list kept the layout it was first drawn in when you changed the card size mid-game, so cards ended up clipped short. This release also claimed to fix the same thing after switching orientation, and did not: those turned out to be two different faults that only looked alike. The orientation one is fixed in 1.7.41.

A Roman numeral could be cut short on a clue card, which mattered more than it sounds: a trimmed III reads as a II, so a clue that looked perfectly sound would send you to the wrong cell. Roman numerals now claim the room they need up front instead of relying on a measurement.

Easy plays the same way every time now. Testers said it was uneven rather than hard, and they were right: sometimes you bounce from clue to clue in ninety seconds, sometimes the only way through is holding three cards in your head at once. Every Easy board is now the first kind. Each clue points at one cell and one symbol, you fill it in, and that makes the next clue readable. All four kinds of clue still appear, and Medium and Hard are untouched.

You can set how large the clue cards are drawn. Minus and plus above the clues, five sizes, remembered between games. Some of you asked to see every card at once and were happy to trade size for it; others want them big. Both are now a button away instead of one being everybody's default.

The clue list has a proper scrollbar. The one Android draws is a hairline that vanishes the moment you stop dragging, which is no use for answering “is there more below?” before you start. This one is thicker and stays put.

Picking a card up to move it takes a shorter hold, and once you are rearranging, almost none at all. Scrolling still wins if you move your finger first, so the list is no harder to scroll than before.

Clue cards now grow with the board. On a tablet the board got bigger last release and the cards did not, so the same symbol was drawn at two quite different sizes depending on where you looked at it. They are tied together now, and the ratio between them holds from a folding phone up to a desktop window.

On a computer, pick a symbol straight in the cell. The popup exists because a cell on a phone is too small to aim at one sixth of. On a screen where it is not too small, the six symbols already drawn in the cell become the buttons: click one to choose it, click again to confirm, drag it downwards to rule it out. The same three actions, just done where you are already looking.

The rest of the interface scales up on a big screen with a mouse. Menus, buttons, the top bar and the icons in it. Phones and tablets are untouched: this only applies where there is a mouse, which is the only reliable way to tell a laptop from a tablet of the same size.

Settings that cannot do anything are no longer shown. A computer has nothing to vibrate and no screen to rotate, so those two switches are hidden there rather than sitting inert.

The cat sat a few pixels off her ledge on larger screens, instead of resting on it.

Kiri now speaks six languages. Spanish, Portuguese and French join English, German and Polish. On a fresh install the game asks which one you want before anything else, showing each language written in itself, because a question about language is no use to you in a language you cannot read.

The board fills the screen it is given. It was capped at roughly phone size no matter how much room there was, so on a tablet you were playing a small grid in the middle of a large screen, and on a desktop-sized window it was worse still. Phones are unchanged; everything larger gets a board that actually uses the space.

An empty leaderboard assumed every player was a man. “Be the first!” has no gender in English, so the masculine slipped into all five other languages at once and stayed invisible to anyone reading the original. It now invites you to post the first time rather than to be the first person, which is correct for everybody.

Back in the tutorial rewinds the board, not just the words. A cell you filled in before reading the explanation can now be un-filled so the explanation makes sense. Back used to appear to skip a step entirely: it returned you to an instruction the board already satisfied, so the tutorial moved straight on again.

The instruction bubble keeps off whatever it is pointing at. It picks whichever side of the highlighted cells has room, instead of always sitting in the same place. It had a habit of covering the very arrow it was explaining.

Stroking the cat and then opening the tutorial left the phone buzzing for the rest of the session. The purr vibrates in a loop, and leaving the menu while she was purring left that loop running with nothing on screen to explain it and no way to stop it short of closing the game.

The tutorial talks to you where you are looking. Its instructions now sit on the board in a bubble beside whatever they are describing, with a tail pointing at it. They used to be in a box at the bottom of the screen, which in portrait meant reading a sentence at the bottom of the phone, hunting for the cell at the top, and going back down for the next one — on every step.

The lesson on ruling a symbol out finally requires ruling something out. It was taught on a cell where you could simply fill the answer in instead, so the whole point could pass you by. It now runs on a cell where filling in is impossible and taking a possibility away is the only move there is — and the next clue only works because you made it.

The arrows drawn over the board were painted underneath the cells, leaving a few pixels visible in the gaps.

Main menu problems in portrait: the action buttons ran off both edges of the screen, their text shrank to nothing after rotating and stayed that way, the Learn to Play buttons sat underneath the cat, and the top icons wrapped onto two lines.

The tutorial has been rebuilt. It used to open with a paragraph covering four ideas at once before you were allowed to touch anything, and people quite reasonably skipped it. It is now twelve short steps — each one either a thing to read or a thing to do, never both — with a counter so you can see how much is left, and your first move arrives within seconds.

Clues are drawn on the board instead of described beside it. The column a clue concerns lights up, an arrow runs between the two symbols it links, and cells that cannot possibly work are crossed through. “The left symbol sits exactly one column before the right one” is a sentence to be unpicked; an arrow just shows you.

The tutorial teaches ruling a symbol out. It is half of how the game is actually played, and until now it appeared nowhere except the help screen. The lesson lands where it pays off: rule one numeral out of one cell, and watch two cells settle themselves.

The tutorial board taught a pattern that is never true again. Every row was the one above it shifted along by a place, so everything read in order and the top row counted 1 to 6 — which one tester took for column numbering, quite fairly. The board is now properly irregular.

Learn to Play and How to Play sit on the main menu. The rules used to be reachable only from inside a game, which is fine for a reminder and no use at all when you are deciding whether to start one. And on a fresh install the game now simply asks which language you would like.

Settings reordered around what you actually reach for. Language sits at the top — if you cannot read the rest of the screen, you cannot get to it any other way. Sound, mute and vibration are gathered into one section instead of being scattered across three.

All eight themes fit in two rows now, light and dark side by side, and the heading tells you which one is active rather than leaving you to spot the ring around it.

Screen orientation moved onto the pause screen, in the same corner as on the main menu. It was two taps deep inside Settings, which is a long way for something people flip on a whim.

The hint counter sat off-centre in its badge at large system font sizes.

Button labels really do stay on their buttons now, including with the system font size turned up. The previous release added shrink-to-fit but gave the text nowhere to shrink into, so it kept spilling over the edge — a fix that treated the symptom and missed the cause.

The symbol and language pickers in Settings broke a long option onto two lines, leaving the other two sitting short beside it.

Buttons and menus now follow your system font size only so far. Past a point the words grow but the buttons cannot, and everything ends up cramped. Instructions, help and the end-of-game screen still scale all the way, because there they have room.

Tapping an open cell a second time reopened its symbol picker instead of closing it, so the only way to dismiss it was to tap right off the board. A side effect of last version’s scrolling fix, caught the same day.

The Roman numeral III could appear as II, with its third stroke poking out below. It depended on the phone rather than the game: symbols were ordinary text and grew with the system font size, and once “III” no longer fitted a board cell it wrapped mid-numeral. Symbols are shapes that have to fit their cell, so they no longer resize or wrap. Everything else still follows your font size setting.

Long button labels could spill off their buttons. Reported in Polish, and German was worse and unreported — the same words are simply longer in some languages. Labels now shrink to fit, so the longest translation no longer decides how the others are written.

The clue panel only scrolled when your finger started on a card. Start the drag in the space beside one and nothing happened — unless you flicked fast enough. The list read as having ended when it had not. Two testers reported this independently, and it took a while to find, because the cause was not in the clue panel at all: an invisible full-screen layer, there to close the symbol picker when you tap away, was quietly taking every touch that no card claimed. It no longer takes them.

A hint could light up a card you never saw. The panel now scrolls the hinted clue into view, and only when it is not already on screen.

Hints point somewhere worth going — the clue that settles a cell outright wins over one that only rules a possibility out.

A hint could spend itself on a card you never saw. On Hard the clue rail runs well past the bottom of the screen, and nothing scrolled it to the card the hint had lit up. The rail now brings that card into view — and only when it is not already comfortably on screen, so the list does not lurch under someone looking straight at the answer.

The glow on a crossed-out clue was as dim as the card under it. Crossing a clue out fades the card, and the highlight faded with it. A hint is allowed to point at a clue you have crossed out, because those can still hold information you never used.

The whole clue window scrolls, not just the parts with a card on them. Dragging in the gap at the end of a short row used to do nothing, which reads as “this is the bottom of the list” when it is not.

Dragging a card just after loading an older save moved a different card. Nothing was ever lost or duplicated — the list simply rearranged itself wrong, which is why it went unreported.

Hints point somewhere worth going. The button now picks the clue that does the most for you, preferring one that settles a cell outright over one that merely rules a possibility out. It used to prefer whichever clue the puzzle happened to generate first, which is why it sometimes highlighted a card while something far more useful sat two rows down.

Shuffling sinks the clues you have crossed out. They are the ones you have finished with, so every shuffle used to deal you a hand half made of them. They now go to the bottom.

Leaving the game during the win music and coming back played it again, on top of itself, both at full volume.

Winning finally feels like something. Solving a board plays a short theme with a burst of confetti behind the results, and the background music steps aside underneath it rather than stopping. Turn the music off and the theme goes with it — it’s music, not a sound effect.

The cat purred every other time you picked it up. Fading the purr out takes a few seconds, and picking the cat up again during that fade left it counting down to silence instead of coming back. It now picks up from wherever it had got to.

Tapping the sitting cat tilted its head once and then never again. It got stuck part-way through the tilt with nothing to bring it out, so every later tap went nowhere. Tap away now.

The cat jerked its head twice when getting up. Touching it raised its head, and if you kept holding, the getting-up animation started over with the head back down and raised it again. A tap now lifts its head; holding gets it up, and the head rises once on the way. Holding shows nothing for the first moment, which is a cat taking a second to rouse rather than a delay.

Two achievements were being reported to Play Games in a way it always refused. Dressed Up and Cat Person are the counting kind, finished by their last step rather than unlocked outright — so the app kept making a call Google was never going to accept, and retried it every time you touched the cat. Your achievements were fine all along; only the chatter was broken.

The cat, properly this time. Apologies for 1.7.7 — that made it worse rather than better. Two things were steering it at once: the animation reacts to touch on its own, and the app was also telling it what to do. Hence a tap running the whole get-up sequence, the stretch playing twice, and the purring occasionally sticking on until you tapped again. The animation no longer handles touch at all, so there is one instruction at a time. A tap lifts its head, a hold gets it up, and it settles back down by itself.

The cat in the corner of the menu behaves properly now. A tap just gets its attention — it lifts its head and puts it back down. Hold it for a moment and it gets up and stretches, purrs while it sits with you, and settles back down a couple of seconds after you stop. Tap it while it’s sitting and it tilts its head at you. Stroking it again won’t interrupt the purring.

The stretch played its opening twice, and a quick tap could leave the cat stuck with its head up until you touched it again. Neither should have been possible; both are gone.

The same time could be saved to the local leaderboard again and again. Opening the leaderboard from the end-of-game screen and closing it put you back on the save step with a clean slate, so the entry could be written repeatedly. If you find duplicates of your own times on the board, that is where they came from — you can delete a saved game from Load, but leaderboard entries stay until the board fills up and pushes them off.

The end-of-game screen is now two steps. First your time and what it cost, with Save or Skip. Then where to go next — leaderboard, menu, or a new game. The two-column version in 1.7.4 fixed the hidden save box but read badly: a wide panel holding two thin stacks. One thing at a time turns out to work better.

The box for saving your time stopped hiding. It was sitting below the fold of the end-of-game screen with the buttons pinned underneath, so the screen looked finished without it. If you have been wondering why your times never appeared on the local leaderboard, that is why. Rearranged again in 1.7.5, which reads better still.

Ads recover on their own after a failed start. If the consent check failed when the game launched — usually just no signal at that moment — ads stayed unavailable for the rest of the session however long you were back online. It now tries again when you return to the menu.

Watching an ad charged you for the same mistake twice. Each ad deducted two lives instead of one, so two ads came out as four lives lost — nine minutes of penalty on a Hard win instead of seven — and you heard the losing sound twice, a beat apart. It could also wrongly deny Flawless or Purist on a run that had earned them. If your last few times looked worse than they felt, this is why.

You can delete saved games. There’s a bin beside each one in Load, so half-finished boards you’re never going back to don’t sit on the menu forever. It asks first — the bin is right next to the row that loads the game.

Long-pressing a solved cell. Help called it “undo it”. What it actually did was rule out the only symbol left in the cell — which in a solved cell is always the right one — so it cost you a life every single time, without exception. If you ever tried it and wondered what you’d done wrong: nothing. It was a trap, and the help screen was pointing at it.

Tapping a ruled-out symbol to bring it back. Ruling out the right symbol costs a life the moment you do it, so anything still ruled out is something you’ve already proved correct. Putting it back could only ever throw away what you’d worked out. Ruling out is now final.

The Controls list in Help is shorter. It’s meant to be a quick reminder of the gestures, so the two entries above are gone along with the Hint and Leaderboard buttons, which you can see on screen anyway.

Tidy Mind could never be earned. The counter for rearranged clue cards stopped at one, no matter how many you moved, so the achievement was unreachable. It counts properly now — though it can only count from here, as the earlier moves were never recorded.

Watching an ad dumped you in the pause menu with a broken clock. A full-screen ad looks exactly like leaving the app, so the game paused itself — and the time you spent watching was then subtracted twice, which is how timers like “-2:-30” appeared. You now come straight back to the board, and the ad costs you nothing but the stated penalty.

Close is gone from the end-of-game screen; there is Menu instead. Closing it used to leave you on a finished board that still behaved as though the game were running — which could be saved and then replayed for another win, over and over. A finished game now ends.

The ad consent form waits for the opening animation to finish instead of landing on top of it, and there’s now an Ad consent settings entry under Options so you can change or withdraw that choice whenever you like.

Achievements — eighteen of them, 1000 points in total. Speed targets on each difficulty, rewards for winning without a hint or without a single mistake, one for playing with every skin, and a few quieter ones for people who notice things. Progress is counted on your device and sent to Play Games whenever you’re signed in, so nothing is lost by playing offline — including anything you’d already earned before this update.

Out of lives? Watch a short ad for one more. Offered only when your last life goes: once on Easy, twice on Medium, three times on Hard, always one at a time. Each adds 1:30 to your global leaderboard time and says so before you watch — your local times are untouched. The clock stops while the ad plays, so you pay the stated price and not a second more. Turn it down, lose signal, or close the ad halfway and you simply get the usual end-of-game screen.

Retry is gone. It handed back the same puzzle with full lives, a fresh clock and the hint counter wiped — so the cheapest route to a good leaderboard time was to fail on purpose and replay a board you already knew. It was written back when there were no lives at all and a mis-tap was easy to make; two-tap confirmation has covered that for a long time, and ads now handle carrying on, with a price attached.

Continue now follows the difficulty you’ve picked. It used to sit there whatever you had selected and then open whichever game you played last — so choosing Hard and pressing Continue could drop you into your Medium board. A dot on each difficulty marks the ones with a game waiting.

The cards turn over one at a time instead of in a blur. Roughly half as many were flipping at once on Hard as on Easy, so the same animation read completely differently depending on difficulty. It now looks the same everywhere — Hard just takes a moment longer, and any tap still skips it.

The music carried on playing after you left the app or turned the screen off, and only stopped if you closed Kiri from recents. It now pauses when you leave and picks up again when you come back.

The round-start deal is slower and evenly paced. The clues drop in, settle for a moment, then turn over one by one. It now takes the same time on every difficulty — before, Hard ran almost twice as long as Easy.

The cat’s paw kept the old skin’s colour after changing skins. Properly this time — the paw now has its own artwork per skin rather than being recoloured on the fly.

Groundwork for a sound problem affecting one tester’s phone, where everything except the opening animation is silent. Not solved yet, but this build can finally tell us why.

The round-start deal now works properly. The clues arrive one at a time instead of all at once, the flip plays out instead of being cut short, and the whole thing runs at a more natural pace.

The timer showed your previous game’s time while a new round was still dealing in.

A break in the card backs, where the middle section didn’t line up with the ends.

The cat’s paw kept the old skin’s colour after you changed skins.

Rounds now deal themselves in. Starting a puzzle used to be abrupt — the board just appeared and the clock was already running. The clues now drop into place face-down, turn over, and only then does the timer start. Tap anywhere to skip it.

Music could vanish for good, with neither the slider nor the mute button able to bring it back. If you’d ever left the volume at zero, it could end up paused in a way nothing could undo. Fixed, and it recovers on its own.

The splash screen never finished on its own if sound effects were off — it waited for audio that was never playing, and you had to tap to get past it. That also meant the music never started for the rest of the session.

The cat’s paw kept the old skin’s colour after you changed skins, until you tapped the shuffle button.

The win screen said every score went to the leaderboard. Play Games only keeps your best time, so a slower run never actually changed anything up there. It now tells you which happened — a new personal best, or that your existing best still stands.

The win screen could run off the bottom of the screen in landscape, taking the buttons with it and leaving no way out.

Hints point somewhere more useful. They now prefer clues involving a symbol you’ve already worked out, rather than one hanging between two unknowns — and tapping the hint button again moves to a different clue instead of repeating itself.

Lives and hints now cost time on the global leaderboard. A raw finish time rewarded burning everything you had, because none of it cost anything. Losing a life or taking a hint adds time to the score sent to Google — so a careful run beats a fast, messy one.

The win screen shows the maths. Your raw time, what each life and hint added, and the total that went to the leaderboard.

Taking a hint warns you what it costs first, with a “don’t show this again” option. Losing a life isn’t warned — it isn’t a choice. Both warnings can be switched back on under Options → Warnings.

The local leaderboard is unchanged — it keeps raw times and its lives and hints badges, so you can still see exactly how a score was earned. Only the global board uses the adjusted time.

Three symbol styles, in Options next to the skins. Some of you find the symbols perfectly clear and others don’t, so rather than pick a winner there’s now a choice.

Sharper keeps the same symbols but makes the confusable ones distinct: Roman numerals gain serifs, so II and III are recognised rather than counted; the upside-down triangle becomes a star; the hexagon becomes a circle.

Pictures swaps every symbol for a colourful icon — food, animals, weather, music, tools, vehicles. Each position keeps its own colour across all six rows, and the palette adapts to whichever skin you’re using.

Your current look is untouched unless you go and change it.

The clue list wouldn’t scroll while rearranging. Once the cards started wobbling, the only way to move the list was to grab a card and drag it to the edge. Now a swipe scrolls and a brief hold picks a card up, like rearranging an app grid.

The symbol picker stayed open when you tapped a clue card, the shuffle button, or started rearranging — and it stayed stuck in place when you swapped the board and clues around. It now closes whenever you touch anything else.

The cat’s paw sometimes swiped in black instead of your skin’s colour.

A cat sits on the clue panel and swipes a paw at your finger when you tap shuffle. Purely for the company.

Both cats now match your skin. They used to be black silhouettes, which on Midnight, Charcoal, Campfire and Pine meant a black cat on a near-black background — barely there. They take the colour of your text now, so they read properly on all eight skins.

“Hints” and the shuffle button share one small card, so the cat has something to perch on and the button no longer crowds the pause and help icons.

Orientation switch. Auto, portrait or landscape — on the menu (top left) and in Options. Pin the layout you want without touching your phone’s rotation lock.

Mute buttons next to the music and sound sliders. Muting the music also frees up your phone’s audio, so Spotify or a podcast can play while you solve.

Clue list scrolls while you drag. Hold a clue near the top or bottom edge and the list moves with it, so a card can go from the bottom to the top in one motion.

The “next to” clue was lying to you. The double-arrow clue means two symbols sit beside each other on either side — but the symbol drawn on the left was always the left one in the answer. Every single time, across 1,717 checked clues. It now genuinely goes either way, so the clue finally means what the card says.

More clues fit on screen. Cards are back to their natural widths instead of all being stretched to the same size — noticeably less scrolling on Hard.

Notes (pencil) mode. Swiping a symbol to rule it out replaced it, and nobody was using the pencil any more.

How to Play is now a quick reference, not an essay — roughly a quarter of the previous text. Controls are a scannable list, and Replay Tutorial sits right at the top.

Clue cards in the help screen stretched across the full width with big gaps between them.

Clue cards lined up in even rows instead of ending raggedly. (Reworked again in 1.4.0 to fit more on screen.)

Swap button on the divider between the board and the clues — flips which side each one sits on, and remembers your choice.

In portrait, the clue list scrolls up and down again instead of sideways.

The timer kept running when you minimised the app. Backgrounding Kiri now pauses the game — you restart the clock yourself when you’re back at the board.

Scroll indicators came back, and the portrait clue list was reorganised.

If Play Games sign-in fails, there’s now a Sign in button that tells you what went wrong instead of the leaderboard option silently vanishing.

Global leaderboards through Google Play Games, one per difficulty, alongside the local top-20 list you already had.

A saved game per difficulty. Leaving an unfinished Medium game no longer wipes your Easy one. There’s a Load button on the menu and in the pause menu, and starting a new game only warns you if that difficulty already has one in progress.

The tutorial is a real game now. A full 6×6 board with most cells already filled, played with exactly the same controls as a normal puzzle — it teaches one clue type at a time instead of using a stripped-down mini board.

Portrait mode on every screen, a shuffle button for the clues, and drag-to-rearrange: long-press any clue, everything wobbles, drag them into whatever order you like.

The colour-smearing bug. Tapping a cell and moving to another left the first one stuck with a coloured tint, so you could “paint” the whole grid. It only ever happened on real Play Store builds, which is why it survived so long.

Occasional notifications, for the rare nudge that a new build is worth a look.

Autosave after every move. A crash, a force-close or an accidental swipe no longer costs you the puzzle — Continue picks up where you left off.

Cells turning invisible after being tapped, and the app icon showing only “IR” instead of the full logo.

First build shared for internal testing.