Pick the size of the board

You can now choose how big the board is before a match starts. It's in the same setup sheet where
you pick the players and the opponent.

• Fences: 4, 5 or 6 boxes a side. The small one is quick enough for a young child. The big one will happily eat an evening.
• Pebbles: 6, 8 or 10 squares.
• Acorns: a 6, 7 or 8 column rack. You still need four in a row, you just get more room to work with.

Everyone starts on the standard board unless they say otherwise, and each game remembers what you
picked last time. The computer opponent handles every size properly. It isn't the old one stretched
to fit.

Chalk keeps its own two boards, the classic slate and the nine board Ultimate.

The porch is furnished

There's a cat tree at the left end of the deck now, with a post, a cubby, two platforms and a
dangling toy. At the other end there's a potted tree with proper branches. Three beds sit between
them, one for the cat and one for each squirrel, and each has a little badge so you can tell whose
is whose: a paw print on the cat's, an acorn on the squirrels'.

They actually use them. Come back to the porch and you might find a cat curled up asleep, or a
squirrel with its tail thrown over itself like a blanket, or a bird fluffed into a ball on a branch
with its beak tucked in. On the cat tree they'll settle on either platform or inside the little
house. They sleep in their own spots rather than in the middle of the floor.

The squirrels are also a bit smaller than they were, which is about right next to a cat.

And the furniture is actually there

Two things used to give the game away. The animals walked straight over the table on their way to
the railing, as though it were painted on the floor. They go round it now. And anything up the cat
tree got drawn behind the chairs, because the game was reading "high up" as "far away". The tree
stands right at the front of the porch, so a cat on its top platform belongs in front of everything,
at full size.

It can rain and you're still dry

Weather still rolls through past the railing. You're under a roof though, and now nothing on this
side of it takes any notice. The boards don't darken at the edge any more, and the animals carry on
exactly as they would in the sun, because they're as sheltered as you are. Watching a shower from a
dry porch is the whole point.

Verse: the word list has had a clean out

A player found a word in Verse that had no business being in a family puzzle. I went looking for
others and found more than one, so the whole dictionary has been re-filtered from scratch against
much stricter rules. 563 words are gone: name calling, crude language, anything suggestive, the
whole vocabulary of drink and drugs, the occult, and a handful of things that simply should never
have been in there.

Ordinary words are still ordinary. Nothing has been softened for the sake of it, and there are
still years of puzzles in the list. Thanks to the player who flagged it.

Fixed

• Fences no longer covers its own board. "You closed a square, go again" used to appear right across the middle of the grid, at exactly the moment you were trying to take your extra turn. It sits beside the board now.

Your daily puzzles are untouched

The fourteen dailies, the backyard, the Archive and your streak are all exactly as you left them.