Warren: race your rabbit home, or grow a hedge in the way

There is a fifth chair on the porch. Warren is a race across a garden, and on your turn you do one
of two things: move your rabbit one square, or plant a hedge to send somebody else the long way
round. That is the whole game, and a child has it in about a minute.

The one rule that makes it a game: a hedge may never seal a rabbit off completely. However tangled
the garden gets, every rabbit always has a way home. So a hedge is never a wall, only a detour, and
choosing between hopping forward and spending one of your hedges is the entire decision.

• Two or four rabbits. Four players race from four sides of the garden at once, which is a very different and much louder game.
• Three garden sizes. Small, standard and large, with more hedges to spend on the bigger ones.
• A computer opponent at gentle or sharp, like every other game on the porch.

Who actually wins more

Play somebody twice and the question arrives on its own. The porch now keeps a running head to head
between the two of you, and it sits at the top of Past Matches: names, the score, and every match
underneath it.

It is kept per pair of names, so swapping seats carries on the same record instead of starting a
mirror of it, and typing your name differently one evening does not split your history. Matches
against the computer are still logged, they just do not count toward a record between two people.

First to three, or first to five

One game is rarely one game. Before you sit down you can now pick a single game, a first to three,
or a first to five. The seats carry the series score, and winning a series gets its own moment,
distinct from winning a game.

Stop for dinner, finish it after

Closing the game used to lose a match in progress. It does not now. Come back and the setup sheet
offers to resume exactly where you stopped, with the same board, the same seats and the same turn.

One match is kept, not one per game, because having to stop is one interrupted evening rather than a
cupboard of half finished boards. Sitting down for a new game deliberately clears it, and the undo
stack is deliberately not carried across: nobody should be able to rewind a board the other player
had already agreed to leave.

The computer plays fairer now

Fences' gentle setting had a real problem. Measured against a random player it won 100% of 300
games, which made it stronger than its own sharp setting at 80%. Anyone who found sharp too hard and
switched down got a harder opponent. Gentle now wins 67.3%, and across all four older games the
spread between the easiest and hardest computer has gone from 42 points to 19. Sharp now beats
gentle everywhere, which sounds obvious and was not true before.

Fences' sharp setting also learned the double cross: with a chain down to its last two boxes it will
decline them, leaving you both and handing the next chain back to you.

And you can now change the computer's difficulty without leaving the match. There is a chip in the
action bar. It used to mean quitting to the porch.

Three or four players at a Fences table can also bring the computer along now, instead of the
opponent silently reverting to a human the moment you chose a third player.

Four achievements for playing with someone

Every achievement in the game so far was solo. Four new ones are for the porch: finish a match with
someone, play all five games with someone, win a first to five, and finish a match with four players
at one keyboard. None of them fire against the computer, because "with someone" is the point.

Your daily streak is still completely untouched by any of this. What happens on the porch stays on
the porch.

Share a result

Finished matches get a Share chip that copies a line you can paste anywhere: who played, who won and
what the score was.

The five games now feel like one mode

Small things individually, and together the reason the porch stopped feeling like four separate
programs.

• One last-move marker across every game. It used to be an accent ring in two of them, a white ring in another, a slightly thicker line in Fences, and nothing whatsoever in Chalk's nine board Ultimate.
• Undo behaves. The chip is now greyed out when there is nothing to undo, instead of being pressable and silently doing nothing. Undoing also puts the last-move marker back where it was and clears the hover, rather than leaving the board with no marker at all.
• Fences pops when you draw a fence, like every other game does on your own move.
• Acorns tells you more: its status line now carries the state of the rack, and it rings the drop that finishes a four in your colour as well as the one that hands your opponent theirs.

Fixed

• The porch fits five cards. With a fifth game the cards hung off both edges of a narrow window.
• Typing your name on the porch no longer writes to disk on every single keystroke. It saves when you finish.

Your daily puzzles are untouched

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