- We gave the widgets a refresh

- The home card no longer wraps your rank once it hits two digits - Now you earn a badge when you share your grid

• Tap any badge to view its full artwork, unlock rules, and earned date. • Settings now shows your local daily rollover time. • Updated reminder copy to better reflect your scheduled notification time.

17 Badges Across 3 Categories: Expanded from 6 to 17 badges grouped by The Board (board layout achievements), The Streak (consecutive play up to 1 year + Hard Mode), and The Tally (total solves & top 10 finishes over time). Renamed & Redrawn Badges: Updated 5 badge names (The Full Week, The Monthlong, Close Call, etc.) and refreshed artwork for Close Call (formerly Streak Shield). iCloud Sync & History Recovery: Your play history, badges, and streaks now automatically back up to iCloud and restore across reinstalls or new devices. Launch & Performance Fixes: Resolved launch crashes when opening via morning reminders and reduced cold-start load times.

Streak Badges & New Art: Added 3 streak badges (Seven Straight, The Thirty, Streak Shield) with history backfills and brand-new artwork for all 6 badges. Badge Celebrations: Earned badges now pop up on a dedicated celebration card. Fewer Post-Game Prompts: Max 1 prompt per finished daily solve to prevent pop-up clutter. Next Roll Countdown: Daily solves now show a live countdown to the next UTC roll. Live Leaderboards: Restored real-time leaderboards. Bug Fixes: Synced Hard Mode settings toggle, fixed home screen corner graphics, and added explicit Streak Shield win-card alerts.

Fixes an issue with pull-to-refresh on the leaderboard.

Join from the board" now always has a way to join.

Leaderboards Are Here! - Daily & 30-Day Boards: Compete for today's top score, or show off your consistency over the last 30 days. - No Account Required: Pick any name and post your board instantly. - Fair & Secure: All boards are re-scored server-side with App Attest verification to keep the rankings genuine. - Offline Friendly: Solves made offline auto-submit the next time you're connected. Fixes & Improvements: - Improved timing logic so retries never artificially wipe your clock. - Strict flood controls to keep fake entries off the board.

Smart Daily Reminders: Optional morning push notifications tailored to your local time (defaults to 9:00 AM) that only trigger if you have an unplayed Daily Roll. New Dice Roll Animation & Haptics: Re-rolling now animates 12 individual dice dropping, bouncing, and settling into the tray with matching layered haptic feedback instead of a static text swap (dice remain fully draggable during animation).

Interactive Coaching: The first board now guides new players step-by-step -- showing how to drag dice, spell words, and fill the board. Dismiss it anytime, or complete it at your own pace. Rules in Settings: You can now read "How to Play" directly from Settings without starting a game. We also added a "Show Tips Again" button if you ever want a refresher. Always-Visible Timer: The stopwatch no longer hides when tapped, ensuring you can always keep track of your time and speed bonus during play.

The clock starts with the game: It used to wait for your first tile, which made the free look at the letters the best move on the board — you could plan the whole solve before the clock knew you were there. Reading the dice is part of solving them, so the clock now starts the moment a game opens, in the Daily Roll and in Free Play alike. The app switcher isn't a pause button: Leaving Wordsicle for another app used to stop the clock, so a hard board could be thought about for as long as you liked at no cost. Time away is time on the clock now. Hiding the stopwatch never stopped it and still doesn't; leaving the daily outright still banks your time and still costs you the board.

Fixed the "Update Available" notice. It was checking with the App Store in a way that could report a version up to a day out of date, so the prompt about the last update often arrived late or not at all. It now checks properly, and also checks when you return to the app rather than only on a fresh launch.

New word list. Wordsicle used to check words against a 370,000-entry dump that accepted things like SCR and MHZ. It now uses ENABLE, the list most word games are built on, plus newer words it predates such as EMAIL and EMOJI. The list is smaller, but everything in it is a real word. Obscure ones are still there, from AAH to ZYZZYVAS. Fixed 41 unsolvable daily rolls. A stricter word list means some racks can't be made into a crossword at all. We checked every daily for the next ten years and found 41 with no solution. Those days now use different dice, and we solved each replacement to confirm it works. The first would have come up on August 28. The Daily Roll is now one attempt. Everyone gets the same twelve dice, so being able to replay until the board came out well made the day's score mean less. Your first finish is your result. The clock belongs to the day now instead of the visit, so leaving and coming back no longer resets it. Free Play still rolls as often as you want. Double tap a placed tile to send it back to the tray, instead of dragging it off the board. Contact Support is in Settings. It opens an email to support@wordsicle.com with your version and device already filled in. The solved card's third stat is now your best word instead of "dice used: 12/12", which read the same on every finished board.

The app now notices when it's out of date and asks if you would like to update.

The home screen now leads with today's dice. All twelve sit face up before you play a tile — they're the raw material, not the answer, so seeing them costs you nothing and gives you something to say about the day before anyone has finished it. Solve it and the board takes over. The card becomes the crossword you built, with your score, solve time and dice used underneath, and buttons to share the grid or play the roll again. Sharing to Instagram is fixed. Stories, Reels, posts and DMs were blacking out the corners of the share card and cropping the board out of frame. Instagram now gets a version built for a full screen, so your grid arrives whole wherever you send it. Share cards look right everywhere else too — no more dark corners in apps that don't handle transparency.

Sharing got a cleanup. • Your result now shares as a single card instead of a card followed by a duplicate emoji grid. Same information, half the clutter. • The share card now shows your solve time and a HARD badge when you've earned one — so a Hard Mode win finally looks different from an easy one.

Hard Mode: switch it on and every word you score locks its dice in place. No rearranging what you've already built. A solve timer, and a speed bonus for finishing quickly. Tap the stopwatch on the board to hide it; it keeps running either way, so hiding it never costs you points. Scoring now rewards ambition. Long words earn a bonus for every letter past the fourth, and every letter shared by two crossing words pays extra. Each move shows what it earned, and the win screen itemizes exactly where your total came from. Because of the rebalance, scores from this version aren't comparable with scores from earlier ones.

- Leave-game confirmation: Backing out of a game that's in progress now asks "Leave this game? Your board will be lost." before discarding it, so an accidental tap on the back button no longer throws away a puzzle you're in the middle of. - Disconnected words on the board don't count towards total points - Sharing a daily puzzle win doesn't reveal the answer