FreeCell, a new deck of cards, and games on a video call. - A new deck for the card games and Solitaire: clearer corners, bigger pips, and picture cards with a crown, a coronet or a sword. Nothing overlaps, even on a small phone. - Five new card backs come with the unlock: Oxblood, Racing Green, Ivory & Ink, Highland Tartan and Art Deco. Pick one in More, Look. - FreeCell joins Solitaire, with the classic numbered deals, hints, undo and a button to finish the game for you. - Solitaire moves a card in one tap, to the best place it can go. Drag to choose the place yourself, or switch one-tap moves off. - Play a friend live on a video call. Start a game from Play With People and they join from the call. Every game you can play nearby works this way too. - A Daily Puzzle widget for your Home Screen and Lock Screen, and the evening reminder now tells you what today's puzzle is. - Chess reviews your game when it ends. Every move is graded from Brilliant to Blunder, you both get an accuracy score, and Find a better move takes you back to your mistakes to have another go. - Dice jump up large in the middle of the board and say what the throw means, so you never squint at a corner to see what you rolled. There is a switch in Settings if you prefer them small. - Meet Chris, who made Boardalo. He shows you round the first time you open the app, in his own voice, and you can watch it again from More.

Five card games, and the cast plays every one. - Cribbage, Gin Rummy, Crazy Eights, Go Fish and German Whist, against any of the characters or with a friend on the same device. - Cribbage has a proper pegging board with front and back pegs, and every hand is counted out for you, fifteen two, fifteen four, so nothing is ever missed. - Gin Rummy lays your hand out in its melds as you play, with your deadwood counted underneath, so you always know when you can knock. - The computer plays them properly. It remembers what you pick up and what you ask for, and in the second half of German Whist the Expert works out every card you hold and plays the last tricks perfectly. - Each comes with an interactive lesson, strategy tips and a short history, like every other game in the app. All five are scored in points, nothing else.

Bug fixes and small polish.

A new welcome for first-time players: tell us what you like to play and Home puts those games first, meet your opponents, and unlock everything in one tap if you want to. The free games stay free. Plus translation fixes on the Home screen.

A cleaner new look: a lighter page, crisper cards and one colour for every Play button. Redesigned You tab: see what to play next, rematch a recent game in one tap, check your last 30 days and your record against each character, and share your record. New in More: free games from the makers of Boardalo. On iPad in landscape, games now show the board beside its controls, and You and Cast use two columns.

Tapping a locked character now shows your head-to-head record with them, and buying takes you straight into that match. The welcome tour numbers the cast from one to four, so it's clear who you start with.

Shut the Box has been redrawn as a real wooden box, with a proper grain, a hinge between the tiles and the dice, and a shallow well for the dice to sit in. New players also get a quick nudge right after their first roll, showing exactly what to do next.

The characters get the last word, and now you can share it. When one of them signs off at the end of a game, a card is built around that line, with their portrait, ready for Instagram Stories or anywhere else you post.

Ludo has been rebuilt. The computer plays a far stronger game, every token you can move now shows where it would land and which moves take an opponent, the board has been redrawn in painted wood, and opponents move at the pace you set.

Snakes and Ladders has been redrawn. The snakes now have flowing, tapered bodies and proper heads, the ladders have wood grain and pegged joints, and both sit on the board with a soft shadow.

A few small improvements to the Premium unlock screen.

Fixed a rare crash that could happen if you left a Nearby game running and switched away from the app: the connection wasn't always closed properly in the background, which could make the app close unexpectedly a few seconds later.

Fixed the chess, checkers and draughts boards: the near-left corner was a light square instead of the official dark one, and for checkers and draughts that meant every piece started one square off from a real board or an analysis engine. Thank you to the player who wrote in with the details.

The daily puzzle now rotates through seven games instead of three, and sharing a solve finally names the right game. Also fixed: the free games were holding the computer on its easiest setting when they should have offered a stronger one.

Finished translating Krampus's in-game dialogue into every supported language, completing all ten seasonal characters in every language the app supports.

Finished translating Flurry's in-game dialogue into every supported language.

Fixed a bug where a nearby or online Snakes and Ladders match didn't record a result or play a sound, and where pass-and-play games were counted as a personal win no matter who actually won.

Finished translating Brindle's in-game dialogue into every supported language. Also fixed a bug where losing a nearby (same-room) match didn't count in your stats.

Finished translating Tinsel's in-game dialogue into every supported language.

Fixed a bug where a nearby (same-room) Senet or Go match could record the wrong result if the connection dropped right at the winning move.

Fixed a bug where a nearby (same-room) Checkers match could record the wrong result if the connection dropped right at the winning move.

Ten more opponents, and they only turn up twice a year. Five arrive for Halloween and five for Christmas. Pemberton is a Victorian ghost who apologizes for winning. Morrow is a jack-o-lantern with no memory, delighted by everything including losing. Tinsel is an elf who has been on her feet since October. Brindle is a reindeer who has never made the team and treats every game as his audition. Each season keeps a fifth character hidden until you beat the fourth. They are not cameos. Between them they carry 4,280 written lines and 1,810 recorded ones: they react at twenty moments, remark on the game in front of them, notice habits in how you play, and end each of the 37 games with a line written for that game. They appear on their own, on the day, with nothing to download. Out of season the cast page shows who is coming back and when. The unlock opens a whole season a week early, keeps it a week longer, and adds a switch to play the seasonal characters any day of the year. The app dresses for the occasion too. Bats in October, snow in December, and neither moves if you have Reduce Motion turned on.

Your opponents finally talk all the way through a game. They used to speak at four moments: hello, who's ahead, you won, you lost. Everything in between was silence. Now they speak at all twenty - taking a piece, losing one, a long think, a lucky roll, a comeback - and each moment is delivered differently. A long think is unhurried. A lucky roll is delighted. Digby still isn't very good at any of this, and still says so. Every game now has one clear set of rules. There used to be two: an Easy Read that left things out, and Full Rules that was a wall. Now there is one, and every game answers the same five questions in the same order - Goal, Setup, Playing, Special rules, Winning - so you learn the shape once and it works everywhere. New artwork on the game cards. Some games were sharing a picture. Checkers, International Draughts, Russian Checkers and Turkish Dama all looked identical, which is a shame when Turkish Dama is played on a plain board with the men in solid ranks. Each one is its own game now. Better on iPad. The main screens were a phone layout stretched across a big screen. Also: the lesson tells you what it covers before you start, the badges page shows what you can reach today instead of a wall of locked ones, and the sounds you hear most stopped repeating one recording.

Online and nearby games are steadier. A position arriving from the other device is now checked before it is loaded, so a damaged one is turned away rather than trusted.

Your opponents come to life. The characters now talk about the game actually in front of them. Not "got one" but "that's four you've had off me now". Not "good move" but "you gave that one the best part of a minute". Every line quotes something that really happened, and they never repeat themselves within a game. They remember how your last game went, not just who won it. Scrape past one and the next game opens with them still sore about it. Hnefatafl, Chinese Checkers and Halma have opponents now too. They were the last three games where you sat down against the computer and found nobody on the other side of the board. Oware, Yut Nori, Snakes and Ladders, Crokinole, Carrom and Mahjong Solitaire no longer throw your game away when the phone rings. They save where you left off and turn up on the Continue card with everything else. Home has a proper shelf now: the boards stand upright and large, and a flick sweeps along them like the old jukebox album view. The computer got honest upgrades across the shelf. Backgammon and Tavla weigh the whole throw rather than one die at a time. Royal Ur searches the stick odds properly. Shut the Box is played perfectly, from a table of every position there is, and Drop Four now plays the solved answer once the board is small enough to prove one. Gomoku finally understands that an open three and a blocked three are different things. Hnefatafl's defenders no longer refuse to win. Hints arrived in Reversi, Checkers, Mahjong and Peg Solitaire. In Peg Solitaire the hint provably never walks you into a position you cannot finish. Halma and Chinese Checkers can now end in a draw when neither side can make progress, instead of running forever. Peg Solitaire's European board is solvable again. The hint used to give up on it after four seconds of searching; it now answers in under a fifth of a second. A design pass over the whole app: one typeface family where there were two, one corner and spacing scale instead of fifteen corner sizes, and a stats tab that is no longer mostly empty before your first game. Sea Battle: a ship could be dragged over the edge of the grid, where the enemy could never hit it and the game could not be lost. Ships stay on the board now.