The “fill in the missing pieces” release.
- 6×6 Kids variant — sits between the trainer-wheel 4×4 and full 9×9. Same mechanics; rectangular 2×3 boxes.
- Animal icons for Kids — 4×4 and 6×6 puzzles render with friendly emoji (🐶 🐱 🦊 🐻 🐼 🦁 🐸 🐢 🐝 🦋) by default. Pre-readers can play. Toggle back to numbers in Settings → Kids puzzles. Each puzzle picks its set at start time and remembers it on resume.
- Hints that actually help — the Hint button now points at a specific cell and names the technique: “Look at row 3, column 7. There’s a cell with only one possible value.” No more guessing where to look.
- Solved banner — when you finish a puzzle, the celebration screen shows your medal symbol, your score, and the points you’d need for the next tier. The medal counters in the Stats sheet finally make sense in context.
- Activity stats — top of the Stats sheet now shows games played in the last 7 / 30 days, current daily streak, and total time invested. Plain-language medal legend below explains how the medal you just earned was decided.
- Mistake feedback default for Standard — Easy / Moderate / Hard / Expert puzzles now flash cells red on wrong moves. Previously this was off by default, which made it feel like nothing was happening when you mistyped a digit. (You can opt out via Custom mode if you want a no-feedback purist run.)
- Front-page game deletion — the in-progress list on the New Game tab now supports the same delete-with-confirmation as the History tab. Long-press a card on iOS, swipe-to-delete on Android.
- Dark-mode helper visibility — selection / same-digit / row-col-box highlight tints were tuned for a near-white background and washed out in dark mode. They’re now bumped in dark mode so the helpers actually read.
- Notes-row preview — the pencil-mark digits on the number pad render at their in-cell position (1 → top-left, 5 → center, 9 → bottom-right) at the same size and weight as the actual draft glyph. Tapping a notes button shows you exactly what’ll land.
- Production-readiness pass — Android now safely loads corrupted save files (no more crashes on bad timestamps; the bad bytes are preserved as
games.json.corrupt-*instead of being silently overwritten).