Puzzle Cottage has always been something you do alone with a coffee. Now there is a second chair.

Out on the porch

A new place, reached the moment you open the game: a covered veranda with two seats facing each
other across a low table, and four games meant to be played across it. Take turns on the same
computer, or play a gentle computer opponent when nobody's about.

• Chalk — three in a row. Plus a nine-board version that will surprise anyone who thinks they have outgrown it.
• Acorns — drop acorns down the rack and line four up.
• Fences — close a square to claim it, and go again. Two to four players.
• Pebbles — trap a line of the other colour and every pebble in it turns over.

Every game has a gentle setting a child can genuinely beat, and a sharp one that will
not go easy on you. Every board is fully open — nothing is hidden from either player, which is what
makes them work with two people sat at one screen.

Two seats at a table

Each player has a chair. The one whose turn it is leans in, warms to full colour, and a pool
of lantern light falls on their side of the table — three things saying it at once, so it reads from
across a room and it still reads in black and white. Their name card sits on the back of their chair
with their own piece drawn on it, so which colour you are is never a guess. And the two
players in each game differ in shape as well as colour — a leaf on the acorn, a groove in the
pebble, a notch in the fence — so every board still works with the colour-safe palette on.

Name your players. The seats, the results and the history all use the names you type.

The porch is a place

It has weather: rain past the railing, the sky moving through the whole day, hills that change with
the season. And it has residents — cats, birds and two kinds of squirrel come and go, and they get
around: along the railing, across the boards, up onto a chair, into the shade under the table. A cat
that has been sitting a while will nod off. When it rains everyone but the cats takes cover, and
after dark the porch is the cats' own.

Every match, kept

The result tells you how long the match took and when it was played, See the board
puts you back on the finished position, and Past matches lists every game played at this
table — which game, everyone who was in it, who won, how long, and the date and time.

And a friend who isn't in the room

All four work through Steam's Remote Play Together — invite someone anywhere in the world and
they take the other chair, no copy of the game required.

Your daily puzzles are untouched

The fourteen dailies, your streak, your rewards and the cottage are exactly as you left them. The
hot-seat games are deliberately separate: they never touch your streak, never unlock anything, and
never count toward a day. And if you have spent the evening on the porch, it will quietly tell you
how many of today's puzzles are still waiting.

Also new

• The game opens fullscreen. Borderless, so alt-tab still behaves — and Settings has a toggle back to a window, remembered.
• Choose at launch, or don't. A Settings toggle decides whether the game asks which mode you want each time, or drops you straight back into the one you played last. Switching is one tap either way.
• Play the boards without a mouse. The directional pad steps between real squares and A places a piece, on all four games.

Fixed

• The rules panel could trap you. On a small window in a longer language, the how-to ran off both ends of the screen and took the "Got it" button with it — Esc was the only way out. It now scrolls.
• The Archive had an invisible scrollbar. It was being drawn exactly one bar-width off the right edge of the screen, so anyone without a mouse wheel had no idea the page scrolled at all.
• Emoji rendered flat. The celebration mark and the streak flame were picking up a monochrome outline font instead of the colour one.

Pull up a chair. Or two.