THE BOARDS ARE NOW LIVING 3D WORLDS The Premium boards and Nexus have been rebuilt as 3D scenes that move behind your game. • Volcano erupts over a field of cracked lava. • Ocean is a reef canyon with jellyfish, a school of fish and a passing whale. • Cyber is a rainy night street, with traffic and people walking by. • Clouds, Forest, Space, Desert, Aurora and Nexus each have a scene of their own. A NEW BOARD: SUBWAY A dim station with a train that pulls in, waits and leaves. It's free: play 3 versus matches against real people and it's yours. UNLOCKS WORTH WATCHING • Earn a board and it's unveiled in full, with its scene running. • Get the Premium pack and its boards are dealt out one by one. • Already own the pack? Open the game. There's a thank-you waiting. NEW BLOCK STYLES The Premium block styles are redrawn to match their boards: basalt cracked with lava, reef stone with coral, glacier ice under snow, mossy timber and more. AND A NEW ICON BloqBot is on your home screen now.

A NEW LOOK Word Wars has been redrawn from the splash screen up. • New lettering everywhere, and a WORD WARS logo built from the game's own letter tiles. • Bigger letters on every block, so you can read a stamp at a glance. • The title screen shows today's date on Daily, your level on Mastery and how far you are through this week's missions. • Each Premium board now has its own lettering on its blocks and keys. A BETTER FIRST GAME The lesson has been rebuilt so every step can be finished. • Your first word now shows you exactly what it sent your opponent. • The block you're asked to answer always has plenty of answers. • Stuck? The lesson suggests a word that works. FIXES • A Daily score that couldn't reach Game Center, because you were offline or it didn't go through, is now kept and sent the next time you open the game. • Blocks landing on a full board slide in from the top instead of covering your rival's name.

PLAY YOUR FRIENDS, WHEREVER THEY ARE Versus has a new engine underneath it, built for playing across devices — and ready for Android players when Word Wars arrives there. • Invite a friend with a link. Send it through Messages, WhatsApp, anything. They tap it, the game opens, and you're in the same room. • Or share a five-character room code and have them type it in. A KEYBOARD THAT LEARNS YOUR AIM • The letter you press now pops up above your thumb, so you can see a mistap the moment it happens. • The keyboard learns where your thumbs actually land and quietly adjusts to you. The more words you play, the better it fits. PREMIUM BOARDS, REPAINTED • Volcano: embers that rise, glow and burn out. • Space: stars that shimmer, and the odd shooting star. • Clouds: real cumulus drifting across the sky. • Forest: falling leaves and sunbeams with dust in the light. ALSO NEW • The Cosmetics screen is rebuilt for phones: every category one tap away, a big live preview, and pictures on every board and block. • The Share button tells you what your next share unlocks.

SHARING, FIXED Share a run and it now arrives as something worth looking at: your score, your best word of the match, and the board it came off, drawn as a card. It used to go out as a plain link. Most apps threw away the picture and the words and showed a blank box with the app's name in it, which is not much of a way to challenge somebody. Everything else is unchanged from 1.5.0.

EIGHT NEW BOARDS — PREMIUM PACK A forest with a waterfall. A volcano. The sea floor. Deep space. A neon city, a sky full of floating islands, a desert at sunset, and an aurora over a frozen lake. These are illustrated backgrounds, not recoloured grids, and each one has something moving in it — leaves coming down, embers going up, light shifting on the water, a scan line crawling down the city. The whole screen is the board, keyboard included. Each comes with a block style drawn for it: cracked lava crust, coral, neon housing, cut glass, stone, cloud, sandstone, heartwood. Block colour still means the same thing everywhere. Big blocks are red, small ones are blue, whatever board you are on and whatever style you have equipped. All eight are part of the Premium pack, along with everything it already unlocked. WEEKLY MISSIONS — FREE Four missions a week, the same four for everyone, reset every Sunday. Type 600 words. Reach a nine-chain. Last five minutes in survival. Finish them for XP toward your level. They are worked out from the date, so there is nothing to download and no connection needed. Your phone and everyone else's arrive at the same four on their own. THREE THINGS YOU CANNOT BUY — SHARE TO UNLOCK Share the game and you earn them. The Premium pack does not include any of these, and no amount of playing gets them either. 3 days the HERALD title 8 days the NEXUS board, and the blocks drawn for it 15 days WADDLES — an angry duck with his own set of emotes One share counts per day, so this is a couple of weeks of telling people about a word game rather than fifteen taps in a row. FIXED Board surfaces no longer shimmer while blocks are falling.

LEAVING THE DAILY NOW COSTS YOU THE SCORE YOU HAD One run a day only meant something if the run ended on the clock. Quit halfway through a bad one and nothing was recorded, so the board was there to play again — and closing the app did the same thing without even asking. Leave now asks first, and tells you what it takes: your score goes to the board as it stands, and you get the summary for it like any other run. Close the app mid-run and the same thing happens quietly. The board is spent either way, which is what one run a day was always supposed to mean. Survival and versus ask too, and say what they cost. Practice does not, because practice costs nothing. SEE WHERE YOU CAME, NOT JUST HOW YOU DID The daily summary used to rank you against yourself. That is a fine thing to know and it is the wrong headline for the one mode where everybody in the world plays the identical board once. Today's leaderboard is the first thing you see now — who is above you, what they scored, and how many points would take the next place off them. Your own history is still there, one tap away, and still what you get when you are offline or signed out. AN INVITE NO LONGER THROWS AWAY WHAT YOU WERE DOING Tapping a Game Center invitation used to close your run on the spot, mid-daily, score and all. Now it knocks first: a banner with their name on it, Join or Not now, and nothing happens to your board until you pick. LONGER WORDS FINALLY HIT HARDER They were supposed to already, and from a standing start they did — but once you had a streak going, the streak decided everything and a twelve-letter word landed exactly like a three-letter one. Length counts the whole way through a match now. And the salvo you get for a long streak stopped arriving as ten copies of the same block, which one word cleared more than half of. Ten different ones. Good luck.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT FOR BLOCKS It turns out a lot of people were, and it is hard to blame them: the board is the only thing on screen with letters on it, so the board looks like the input. It is not. Every word in the dictionary is available from the first second, blocks or no blocks, and typing constantly is the whole game rather than an advanced technique. Nothing said so anywhere. Now something does — once, across the middle of the board, and it goes as soon as you type. A SHORTER WAY IN The tutorial was seven steps and two of them were tests rather than lessons: one wanted a six-letter word, the other wanted three words typed inside a couple of seconds of each other. Both are things the game teaches you by itself in about a minute of actually playing it, and both were where people stopped. Five steps now. Type a word, see what it does to the other person, answer what comes back, learn what happens if you let it pile up, and then the one habit that makes all of it work. The card sits over the board where you are already looking, and if you want to run it again there is a button for that on the last screen. SOMETHING TO SAY AT THE END Every emote, along the bottom of the versus scoreboard, one tap each. Whatever you send plays big with your name over its head, three times, and your opponent gets it on their scoreboard. Win graciously. Or don't. AND TWO THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN At the end of a two-player match, the two of you could be looking at different final scores for the same game. The winner's phone was right and the loser's was missing most of the victory bonus. Both phones now agree, because the numbers are sent rather than guessed at. Inviting a friend could also drop you into what looked like a quick match search that never found anybody. The invite screen either opens now or it does not, and if it does not you get your lobby back instead of a search that was never running.

THE IPAD KEYBOARD IS AN IPAD KEYBOARD NOW The last update gave the iPad a keyboard built to phone measurements, on the reasoning that bigger keys on a bigger screen would be a quiet advantage in a game scored by words per minute. That was the wrong call, and it was wrong in a way you could feel: a phone keyboard stranded in the middle of a foot of glass, with keys about a third the width of the ones iOS puts on the same device. The split layout came off worst, since the whole point of it is two halves far enough apart to need two thumbs. Both layouts fill the iPad now. MENUS YOU CAN ACTUALLY SCROLL Every menu in this game is wall-to-wall buttons, which left nowhere for a scroll to begin — a finger dragging down the title screen opened whatever it landed on instead. Buttons wait for your finger to come back up now, and sliding off one cancels it, which is what every other button on your phone already does. CHALLENGES TURN UP Game Center has two challenge systems and this game was reading the one yours do not arrive in. So a challenge sent to you notified you, and then appeared nowhere in the game. It sits on the title screen now, above everything else, and one tap takes you to the board it is scored on. And if you have already used today's daily run when a challenge lands, your score goes to it on its own. No more being told to come back at midnight for a race that would have finished by then. A LONGER DAILY Seventy-five seconds instead of sixty. A minute was not quite enough to dig out of the opening pile and still have a run left to play, so the clock is longer and the board leans on you at the same pace it always did, spread over the extra time rather than stacked on the end of it.

IT PLAYS ON IPAD NOW Properly, rather than as a phone app pulled to fit. The keyboard is built in real measurements instead of as a share of the screen, so the keys are the size your thumbs already know — no bigger on a tablet, which would have been a quiet advantage on a game scored by words per minute. On an iPad it splits into two halves at the edges, because the middle of a foot-wide keyboard is not somewhere a thumb goes. There is a switch in Settings if you would rather set it down and use all ten fingers. The room that frees up goes to your opponents' boards, which a portrait screen has never had space to show you before. VERSUS HAS A ROOM OF ITS OWN Tapping VERSUS used to hand you straight to Apple's matchmaking screen, which takes over and, on a quiet evening, finds nobody. There is a lobby now with three doors: find anyone playing right now, text an invite to anyone in your contacts, or take on the CPU. The CPU door is always open. It is not a consolation prize behind a failed search — it is there from the moment you walk in, and if a search has been running twenty seconds without finding anyone, it says so. SEND SOMEBODY YOUR RESULT Every summary has a Share door: survival, the daily, solo and versus. It builds a card from the run — the score, the clock, the badge for what you actually did, and the best word you played, drawn as the blocks you played it against. CHALLENGES THAT ACTUALLY START Race a friend on the Daily or Survival board and the challenge now waits for you on the title screen, above everything else, with their name on it and the score to beat. One tap starts the right mode. The end screen tells you whether you took it, and by how much. DON'T DROP THE STREAK Two reminders, and only two: the daily board rolling over, and a streak you are about to lose. Nothing else, nothing if you have no streak, and nothing at all unless you ask for it.

LEADERBOARDS, IN THE GAME There is a board to be on now, and a screen to see it on. BOARDS shows the Daily and Survival leaderboards — everyone, or just your friends — with your own placing picked out of it. It also tells you what the next place up is worth. Not a rank, which is only a verdict, but the gap: the points between you and the player one line above. On a busy day that is usually a single good word. ACHIEVEMENTS Seventeen of them, from your first win to a hundred matches, and they work now. Break four blocks with one word, hold an eight-link chain, type a twelve-letter word, win without losing a life. Each one has a title attached that you can wear on the mastery screen. CHALLENGES Pick somebody and race them on a board for a day, three days or a week. Game Center tells you when they take your place, and tells them when you take it back. WINNING LOOKS LIKE WINNING The end-of-match screen was built for a desktop window and arrived on your phone squashed into the top third of it. It uses the whole screen now, the type is large enough to read at arm's length, and a win gets a celebration instead of a word in gold. A loss tells you the margin. Being beaten by four hundred points and being beaten by forty thousand are different evenings, and only one of them is worth a rematch — so the screen says which it was, and puts the rematch button under your thumb. AND THE SCOREBOARD AGREES WITH THE RESULT You could win a match and still finish second on points. Taking the match is worth a great deal more than it was, and winning now doubles what your attacks were worth, so the player who won is the player at the top of the table. Speed Demon now asks for 50 words per minute rather than 65. The old number was set on a full-size keyboard and was never a fair ask of a thumb.

SURVIVAL — a new mode One board, three lives, no clock. It opens calm and keeps speeding up until it is not survivable, and your result is how long you lasted. There is no finish line, only the point where you go under. YOUR PROGRESS NOW FOLLOWS YOUR APPLE ACCOUNT Signed in to Game Center, the game keeps a backup of your record in your own iCloud account. Lose the phone, replace the phone, sign in on the new one, and your level, your unlocks and your streak are already waiting. Nothing is sent to us — there is no server of ours for it to go to. A KEYBOARD BUILT FOR THUMBS The on-screen keyboard has been redrawn: bigger keys, a header you can read, and a tap that lands between two letters now goes to the one that can actually continue the word you are typing. Fewer words lost to a near miss. SETTINGS AND MASTERY, REBUILT FOR A PHONE Both were laid out for a desktop window and sat squashed into the top half of a phone screen. Rows are now sized for a thumb, the record screen puts its numbers where you can read them, and the volume sliders can no longer be set to zero by a tap that missed. Plus the usual: a dictionary that leans the right way on a boundary, and a good deal of quiet repair underneath.

SAY SOMETHING WITHOUT TYPING Versus matches now have emotes. Hold the key above P, slide up to the reaction you want and let go — your opponent sees it straight away, and so do you. Seven of them, all newly drawn and animated: cheering, crying, shocked, furious, smitten, hyped, and flat-out dead. The whole character has been redrawn from scratch to go with them.