What's new

1.129.02026-09-19

• A longer table name no longer pushes the Taroky table off your phone. If your name ran past about sixteen characters, it crowded out the line the table speaks — "you hold the XIX, call a partner or go alone" — until that line was a few letters wide and ran down the screen, taking the table with it. Your name now gives way to the sentence on a narrow screen, the way it already did on a wide one, and shortens with a "…" instead. Fives had the same fault and is fixed with it.
• The side seats on a medium-sized window are the size they were meant to be. Between roughly 700 and 900 pixels wide the two side players were drawn smaller than they are on a phone — the window was getting wider and the seats were getting narrower. They now hold the size the rest of the app already assumed.

1.128.02026-09-18

• Big print is now one setting rather than sixty-five numbers. Every part of a player's seat — the face, the name, the bone back, the count and the bid shield — grows by the same amount. Some of it did not grow at all before: the bid shield and the count on a phone were the same size in Big print as in ordinary print, which nobody chose.
• The seats are measured against the published accessibility standards for resizing text and for zooming to 400%, so the app is tested against something that does not drift.
• The Table theme buttons stay on the screen in Big print. On a phone the four of them ran off the edge and cut Slate off, and the whole page slid sideways. They wrap onto a second line now instead.

1.127.02026-09-17

• A hand from an online table has a hand key too. It is in Hand/AI Insights on the end-of-hand card, and it goes with anything you send from there — so a hand that went strangely at a real table can be dealt again and looked at. Paste it on the 42 setup screen and you play that hand from the seat of the person who sent it.

1.126.02026-09-17

• You can see who the host is. At an online table the host's seat says HOST — beside the name on a laptop, on the banner over the face on a phone.
• Taking back a bone is something the whole table can follow. The button is easier to spot and says what it does. Once asked, the same spot says whose bone it is, how many answers are still to come, and the seconds left, counting down — for the person who asked as much as everybody else. When it ends, the table is told how: taken back, the table said no, nobody answered in time, or play moved on.
• Table talk stays at the newest line, including after the table redraws or the window changes size. Scroll up to read back and it leaves you there until the next line arrives.
• A brief glow round the talk panel when somebody else says something, so a laptop notices a message without watching the corner.

1.125.02026-09-17

• Online tables hold up through a long game. From about the seventh hand of a game, somebody whose phone locked or who refreshed could not get back into the hand — the table sat waiting on them and, five minutes later, cleared it. The whole game is kept now, so coming back works in the last hand as well as the first.
• A bot covering somebody's chair stays in it when a hand is cleared, instead of the host waiting out the absence and covering the chair all over again.
• Asking to take back a bone, and answering, count as the table being in use, so a table in the middle of deciding one is not timed out.
• When a hand is cleared, the table says why — five quiet minutes, or a phone that could not catch up with the hand. The score stands either way.

1.124.02026-09-12

• Replaying a hand no longer costs you the game you were playing. It used to start a fresh game, so the scorepad went blank and the marks you had built up were gone — and gone for good, not hidden behind the replay. Now a replay is a side trip: your game is kept, and when the replayed hand ends there is a Back to your game button with the score on it, so you can try the hand another way and then pick up where you were.
• Replaying from inside a replay still leads back to the real game rather than to the previous attempt, and leaving a replay table offers the way back rather than abandoning everything.

1.123.02026-09-11

• The app now tells us when it breaks. If it hits a fault — a screen that won't draw, something that stops working mid-hand — it sends a note about the fault itself: the error, the version you were running, the size of your screen, and the hand it happened in, so the same hand can be dealt here and watched breaking. Until now the only way we heard about anything was if somebody typed it, which means most of what goes wrong was never fixed because it was never seen.
• The hand goes up with the chairs called south, west, north and east — not your name, not the names you gave the bots, and not the names of whoever you were playing with. Nothing else about you goes either: no account, no device id, no location, nothing you typed.
• And you can turn it off, under Profile → Tell us when the app breaks. It starts on, because a fault nobody reports is one that never gets fixed, and it takes one tap to stop.
• The privacy page now says all of this, including the two things — that and the running count of hands played — that are the whole of what leaves your phone without being asked.

1.122.02026-09-12

• Table talk at the Taroky table, the same as 42's: on a phone the Talk chip sits in the hand where the twelfth card leaves a cell, with the red count, and a new line previews over the chips above the hand. On a laptop the talk stands on the felt below the seats, or in the dock's corner on a narrower one. The four quick things to say are the same.

1.121.02026-09-12

• The talk panel beside the table shows on ordinary laptops too. It had been holding back on screens around 1366 to 1500 wide, which with Windows display scaling is most of them, and leaving the small box in the dock. It now takes the room past what the east seat shows and needs less of it.

1.120.02026-09-11

• Table talk beside the table on a laptop. At an online 42 table the talk now stands in the right third of the felt, the mirror of the played-hand record on the left: the lines, the four quick things to say, and the box to type in, all the height of the table. The small box in the dock and the Talk button at the top go where the panel fits.

1.119.02026-09-11

Two fixes for the phone at an online 42 table.

• The played bones stay between the seats. On a phone the bone your east or west opponent played could land under their name and their bones. The trick now sizes itself to the room it has, and the side bones stand upright, the way a side player's bone points at the middle of a real table.
• Table talk lives in the seventh bone's cell. The Talk chip sits where the seventh bone was, the size of a bone, with a red count when somebody has said something you haven't read. A new line shows for a moment over the GAME and HAND chips, never over your bones; tap it to open the talk. The four quick things to say at the table are "Nice play", "Thanks, partner!", "What a hand!" and "Dagnabbit".

1.117.02026-09-11

Joining a table is one thing to do, and the screen says so.

• Pick your chair. Arrive at somebody's table and the chairs are the first thing on the screen, under a heading that says what to do. Open chairs say Sit here, and whose side it is by the host's name — with Bobo, against Bobo. The middle of the table says Tap a chair to sit, then You're in and who calls the shake.
• Your name, asked at the chair. Sit down while you're still "Player" and one field asks what the table should call you.
• The code, one line, under the table for guests — Code, Copy, Send this table. The host still gets the full invitation block on top.
• On a laptop the chat stands beside the table, so nothing is below the fold. Four quick things to say instead of six.

1.116.02026-09-11

• "Hand/AI Insights & Troubleshooting" is the new name of the fold on the end-of-hand card — the same box for your words, the same record of who played what and why.
• The Install app note sits right under its button now, solid, at the right end of the row on a desktop.

1.115.02026-09-11

• Install app says what it does. Rest on the button and a note explains: it puts Texas Bones on your home screen or Start menu as its own window with its own icon, keeps a copy so it opens without a signal, and installs nothing from a store and nothing on your PC beyond that. The same words lead the how-to panel on a phone.

1.114.02026-09-11

Tell us what happened, from the card.

• "What happened?" on every end-of-hand card. Open it and there is a box for your words — a bot that played badly, played well, or not the way you expected — and Send feedback. What goes: the hand as it was played, the bots' reasons where they gave them, your words, and the app's version. Nothing about you. With no signal, the same text is copied to your clipboard to send when you can.
• The hand record under it — who played what, and why: the key, the bid, the auction and every trick in order. It scrolls inside the card, so the card grows when you open the fold and stays put when you don't.
• Copy key is gone from the card; the key is in the record. Save hand and its note share the row.
• Contact on the home screen is the old Feedback button, renamed: a mail to us for anything that is not one hand.

1.113.02026-09-11

A learning hand for Taroky.

• New to Taroky? Play a learning hand. From the Taroky screen or the rule book's Taroky tab: one hand, walked through a move at a time with a note at each moment that matters — "everybody good?", the talon, what gets announced, the moment the XIX falls and you learn who your partner is, the Skýz over the Mond, the Pagát trumping in, greasing a partner's trick, and the count and the chips at the end. You read and press Next; nothing is asked of you.

1.112.02026-09-11

The end-of-hand card puts the next hand first.

• The card is reorganised, on every game. The result and the marks in two short lines, then Shake 'em, then the extras under it: Send and Replay side by side, Copy key, Save with a proper note box, and a Troubleshooting fold at the foot with the hand key, the bid, the auction and the order of play trick by trick, all copyable in one tap.
• The same three regulars at every table. Taroky seats Ed, Bobo and Becky now, and Moon seats Bobo and Becky; renamed bots keep their names in every game.
• Online moves are paced so a table whose bots play fast can never outrun the relay's limit.
• The bots say why. At the end of a 42 hand the Troubleshooting block carries each bot's reason beside its bid and each of its plays — "led the double to cover its off", "could not win it: threw the cheapest, kept the count back" — set at the moment of the decision. Never shown during play.

1.111.02026-09-11

Taroky is the real four-player game now.

• Four play, with a partner. The player whose turn it is asks "everybody good?", calls a partner with the XIX (or the next one down, or goes it alone), takes four from the talon while the next two take one each, and the four of you play twelve tricks. Anyone can take the hand as a prever instead, alone against three for treble.
• Two ways to count and pay, one game. Texas counts every card straight to 106 and pays by the tournament formula in chips; Czech counts in threes to 70 and pays by the margin. Pick yours on the Taroky screen; it is saved.
• What you hold is announced and paid before a card is led — Big ones, Little ones, Bita, the Trul, four Kings, Honery — and you can announce Pagát to the back, say contra, or answer re-contra.
• The partner is marked on the seats the moment the called card falls, and the card at the end of the hand says who was with whom, the count, and every chip that moved.
• Taroky online plays the same game; the rule book chapter is rewritten for both settings; and the home page now says what it has: Texas 42, Fives, Moon, and Taroky.

1.110.02026-09-11

One more online fault, found once the relay was deployed.

• A Taroky table whose host dropped out now finishes the hand. When a bot sat in for the missing player, the bots were not playing that chair; they do now. Moon had the same fault in waiting.

1.109.02026-09-10

Online play checked live before the weekend, and Taroky's table opened.

• Taroky can be played online now. Set up a table from Online play, or open one from the Taroky screen, and the others join by code or link.
• Five faults found at real tables, fixed. A Taroky table fell out of step on the first bid, and a guest could not play a card; Rematch at the end of an online game dealt the host a game of their own; a player who left mid-hand and came back by the link ended the hand a mark ahead of the table; and a table whose host dropped out mid-hand could never finish the hand. Now the host's Rematch shakes for everybody, a rejoin keeps the table's score, and when somebody has been gone a while the device running the bots is asked whether a bot should sit in for them.
• Open chairs glow in the lobby, so it is obvious a seat is waiting for you.
• Saved hands say more: "Dad bid 30 on treys, set · Rob shook", and the end-of-hand card's auction line shows a pass round and a reshuffle.

1.108.02026-09-09

Three small things from the table, before the Taroky work.

• The end-of-hand card says what the trumps were ("Dad bid 30 on fives"), what the defenders needed when a bid was set, and one small line under it: who shook, the bids in order, who led. Enough to go over a hand afterwards without remembering it.
• The trump grid runs blanks to sixes, with doubles and follow me last.
• The table's sentence stays on one line on a desktop. "You won the bid — name your trumps." was breaking after "name".

1.107.02026-09-09

The end-of-hand card in one piece, and the profile file made simple.

• The end-of-hand card no longer scrolls inside itself. On a wide screen it has the whole height under the top bar, so Shake 'em is in reach without scrolling; on a phone the strip it sits in scrolls as a whole.
• Save this hand and its note sit on one line, the button a third of it and the note two thirds.
• Importing a profile file replaces this phone's profile, after a warning that names both. Nothing is added or merged any more, so the counts cannot double.

1.106.02026-09-09

The Fives board runs the long way, your profile file comes home safely, and two rules settled.

• The Fives board lays its long runs along the long side of the space it has, turning the side arms once and then running, so bones are never drawn under others and a double is never set adrift from its run. The bots also play a beat slower, so you can follow who laid what.
• Importing your own profile file on the same phone restores it instead of adding its counts to yours a second time. The profile page now says what the file holds, in plain words.
• Keep a hand more easily. The note box on the end-of-hand card is a proper box with an example, and the Saved hands list on the 42 setup screen takes a pasted hand key.
• In a Plunge the partner names trumps and leads, as in a Splash.
• The bid ladder climbs three marks above whatever the table opens at: to 168 from a one-mark open, to 210 from a two-mark one, one mark higher each time.
• The tip jar sits under the theme row now, above the buttons.
• The bots page says what the bots do not do yet, and its change log reads in two batches.

1.105.02026-09-09

The tip jar where you can see it, a hand you can keep, and the bots page as it should read.

• Leave a tip. A gold pill beside the training-hand banner, and under it the promise in one line: no cost, no ads, no selling your data, funded by tips and merchandise only. The Support panel opens on the same words.
• Save a hand. The end-of-hand card takes a note and keeps the hand; the 42 setup screen lists your saved hands, each a replay with its own ×; they travel in your profile file.
• The bots page says how the bots actually play now, with their own change log at the foot.
• On a phone, the first end-of-hand card says where the scorepad is.
• The rule book names the three rule sets we checked ours against, and the recommended read on Where else to play now says its right edition.

1.104.02026-09-09

Four small things off a phone, and one board that stops flipping.

• The bones on the table no longer blink on every play. Each bone lands once, when it is played.
• No more stray gold ring. A panel no longer highlights its first button when it opens, so the bid grid does not look like it is recommending a bid; and a bone tapped when it cannot be played no longer keeps a ring.
• Your interrupted solo hand sits with your active tables, marked SOLO, with its own × to forget it.
• The Fives board keeps its shape when the first double joins the right end of a chain. It used to mirror the whole layout between one play and the next.
• In Fives' Compact view the bone played later is drawn over the one before it, now by rule.

1.103.02026-09-09

The scorepad stays put at the end of a hand.

• On a desktop the scorepad no longer jumps to the bottom-left corner when the hand ends, shrunk to its labels with the marks hanging off the paper. It stays on the right, at the size it had during the hand.

1.102.02026-09-09

How the bots play, written down, and the number the page was missing.

• The bots page says what each of the three actually does — Easy, Standard and Sharp, a paragraph each, from the play as it now is.
• Sharp measured as you meet it. The published ladder ran Sharp with its thinking-ahead switched off, for time. With it on, Sharp beats Standard about 69 in 100. Both numbers are published now, and labelled.

1.101.02026-09-09

The 84 is played properly, the profile file carries your stats across, and the profile points at the stats page.

• The bots play an all-tricks hand the way it is played. The bidder leads trumps, then live doubles, the covering double next to last and the off last; the defenders keep the doubles and pairs that can set it and throw the low bones of dead suits first.
• Importing a profile file adds its game stats to this phone's instead of replacing them, once per file, and says how many hands it added.
• The profile's stats row is a link to the Game Stats page.

1.100.02026-09-09

Sharp reads the bid, a hand is priced both ways, and the desktop scorepad behaves.

• Sharp reads the bidder's shape off the bid. A 31 or a 36 is one off, a 30 or a 35 two; when such a bidder leads a bone that is neither trump nor double, that trick is the chance to set, and Sharp spends a winner on it.
• The bid is priced with doubles as trumps too, and the better way is the one bid — a hand with four doubles and a 6-5 can be a pass one way and a 31 the other.
• The desktop scorepad no longer balloons in a game to 3 marks. Its mark drawings were pinned by width and grew to 200px tall, pushing the hand down its column and squeezing the bid panel into a scroll. The height is pinned now.

1.99.02026-09-09

The setter and the bidder in trouble.

• A defender holding the trumps strips the bidder — leads them high so he cannot trump count later.
• A bidder short of the top trump flushes low, keeping the double back for the last one; and when more trumps are out than it holds, it leads nothing that calls count.
• Sharp reads the voids the table has shown. It will not lead a suit an opponent has shown void in while that opponent may still hold a trump, and as a setter it leads the suit its partner is void in so the partner can throw count.

1.98.02026-09-08

Your hand survives a refresh, and the stats know where a hand was played.

• A refresh, a swipe-down or a closed tab no longer loses a solo hand. The browser asks before you leave a hand in play, and if you go anyway the home screen offers Back to your hand for an hour — Texas 42, Fives, Moon and Taroky, alone or passing the phone. Choosing to leave clears it.
• Game Stats count online tables separately. Each game's row now shows how many of its hands were played at a shared table, on this device and everywhere.
• A defender in the lead plays the double that calls count, the way a setter does.

1.97.02026-09-08

The bots play the hand the way they bid it.

• The bidder leads its covering double before the off it covers, and keeps a trump back until its offs are gone.
• Standard throws count to a partner who cannot lose the trick — the partner led the highest bone left in the suit, or the top trump.
• A defender pounces: unable to follow and playing ahead of its partner, it puts count on the trick rather than waiting to be sure; and it throws singletons to make the voids it pounces from.
• No more gifts. Sharp no longer hands a ten to a trick the other side is winning when it holds a countless bone.
• A Nello bidder loses on purpose at every level. Easy could win a Nello trick by accident.
• "Send this hand" sends it to us, with the hand written out, and says so when it has.
• *The rule book's Where else to play section now points to a book on the game worth reading.*
• The bots' numbers are re-measured: Sharp beats Standard about 57 in 100, Standard beats Easy about 81.

1.96.02026-09-08

The bots bid like people.

• Standard and Sharp now bid by what a hand can lose — the trump suit's risk and each off's, in points, against what each bid can afford. They open far more often: a table of bots used to throw in a third of all deals with four passes.
• Two table manners came with it. A bot no longer raises its own partner's 30 to 31 on the same kind of hand, and it no longer stretches to 31 just because the seat before it said thirty — only the last bidder does that.
• Sharp keeps one bid to itself: the 30 that counts on a partner for a trick, on a hand with two offs. Standard passes those.
• The bots' page and the What's new numbers are re-measured: Sharp beats Standard about 57 in 100, Standard beats Easy about 83.

1.95.02026-09-08

Coming back to an online table works.

• A refresh, a locked phone or a dropped signal now brings you back to the hand as it stands at any table with a bot in it. It never did: the app could not replay a bot's move on the way back, and a table with two people and two bots is the usual table.
• The end of a hand goes on when everybody has pressed Shake 'em! Whoever pressed first used to wait forever.

1.94.02026-09-07

The table can always be dealt again, and the iPhone's trick is off the seats.

• A stuck hand has a way out. If a hand cannot be picked up again, the host gets a Deal again button in the lobby, the marks stay, and everybody starts the next hand clean. The app stops trying to catch up after two failed attempts and says what to do instead of flickering.
• The relay clears a hand that a phone reports it cannot rebuild, at once rather than after five idle minutes.
• On phones 430px wide and under, the played bones no longer land on the side seats: the trick sits at the foot of the felt and the name plate floats over it. On short phones the seat cards drop their domino tile to make the room.

1.93.02026-09-07

A correction to the morning's cut.

• The "New to 42?" training-hand button is back under the game cards; it should not have gone. What is gone is the small "Start here" tag on the Texas 42 card.

1.92.02026-09-07

The morning after Westfest's first day: one real fault, fixed.

• Everyone at an online table now deals the same hand. If your saved go-to rules differed from the host's, your phone dealt its own hand from the shared shake and the table stopped at the first play the two could not agree on. The host's rules now win on every phone, every time.
• iPhone: the table is sized to the screen you can see, not the screen with the address bar hidden, so it should no longer need scrolling.
• The "New to 42?" banner is off the home screen. The training game is still under How to play.

1.91.02026-09-06

The count starts clean.

• Game Stats now shows the relay's own totals, which were zeroed this morning. Everything played from here on counts from nothing.

1.90.02026-09-06

The night's phone screenshots: a bid panel that went missing, and the table's own words.

• Your bid comes up after a drawn shake. When the draw made you first to speak, the draw card had covered your bid panel and nothing brought it back.
• TABLE RULES is the same box as LEAVE on a phone, two lines, top right, clear of the wordmark.
• Your plate sits bottom-left and the table's sentence bottom-right on 42 and Moon phones, the way the desktop has it.
• Moon's phone dock has SEE PLAYED on the left and a bid-and-trump chip on the right, and the bidder's badge shows the suit with MOON. When only Pass is offered, the panel says why: once someone bids Moon no one can bid over it. Your own plate says SHAKER in Moon too.
• Words: the feedback card, the store page, Game Stats, the presets note, and a shorter page on how the bots work. "Which game?" says Texas 42 and Fives (Straight Dominoes), with Moon and Taroky marked FEATURE COMING.

1.89.02026-09-05

Small things seen with your own eyes.

• When you shake, your own seat says SHAKER, in 42 and in Fives. It always said so on the other three; now it says so on yours.
• Taroky's sitting-out seat says DEALER.
• The 42 scorepad sits on its own paper at every desktop width. At some window sizes its tally ran off the edge.
• The training game's notes: the first hand now hands on to the second, tells you where the played record is on your kind of screen, and two sums in hands two and three are corrected — including the last trump in hand two, which the bones already told you was Becky's.

1.88.02026-09-05

The tip jar is real.

• Leave a tip. The Support panel and the 42% Pledge page now have a Leave a tip button. It opens Stripe's payment page in a new tab; Stripe takes the payment and we never see your card. Tips count toward the pledge like everything else.
• Privacy says exactly that, in its own section: a link out, no Stripe code in the app, nothing tied to your play.

1.87.02026-09-05

The evening before the doors open: a table survives a dropped host, the training game goes to three marks, and Moon's record behaves on a phone.

• Online tables carry on when the host drops. The table decides who plays the bots, so the bidding cannot lock on a phone that has gone. A hand the table clears after five idle minutes costs the hand, not the game. A device out of step catches up from the table's own record.
• The training game is three hands: bid and make it, the count, then you defend and set them. Three marks.
• Moon on a phone: the played record is the SEE PLAYED chip, not a box over the seats.
• A 42 hand can be played out. A Profile setting, End a 42 hand once it's decided, on by default; off plays every trick. At a table it is the host's rule.
• Seat counts only in Fives. Moon's seats read "3 tricks".
• Fives Focus on a desktop: name, count and tag on one clean line. Focus is off phones.
• The rule book: alphabetical vocabulary, two entries out for now, Off is "a bone that is not a trump or a double", and Fives opens on straight dominoes.
• Replay a hand is out of the 42 setup for now; the key stays on the end-of-hand card.
• The BACK footer finishes the pane on every phone screen.
• New to 42? reads in each theme's own colours.

1.86.02026-09-05

The morning the doors open: 42's record joins Moon's down the felt, and Focus gives Fives its board.

• 42's played record now lives in its own box down the left of the felt, exactly as Moon's, with the rows as they were: plain bones upright, count bones flat to the right, the points at the end.
• Moon's record has tighter rows, so the bones are bigger. Your own seat shows no count; your name sits centred on your face and the bid shield covers nothing.
• The table's sentence sits in the bottom-right corner of the lane, always, whatever is happening.
• Fives' Focus view does what it says now: the other players are one line each, name and count with SHAKER or PARTNER as a word; your hand is one row of seven; the lane is one line. The board gets the height.
• The 42% Pledge page's wording is updated: dominoes and Taroky, tournaments and teachers, the first ledger in early January.
• The training hand reads better in three places, points you at the Played box early, explains the moment your partner covers you, keeps its last note out from under the header, and shows no scorepad.
• How the bots work is rewritten shorter, with the same numbers.

1.85.02026-09-04

The evening before the doors open: room on the felt, a Focus view for Fives, and Moon's record in its own box.

• 42 on a desktop: your partner's seat sits just under the header, and the north bone has real room under his back. The played record's tricks are turned the right way now — count bones upright on top, plain bones flat below.
• Fives on a desktop: your partner lies down again beside his face, the three seats hug the header, your own seat sits further left and closer to the dock, and the commentary further right. Focus joins Board View: no scorepad, no backs, the board as big as the felt allows.
• Moon on a desktop: the played record has its own box down the left of the felt, name beside each trick. The scorepad is gone from Moon on every screen; the dock chips carry the score. The names under the played bones are bold, and the table's sentence is smaller, right-aligned and no longer squeezed into a column.
• Where else to play 42 — Follow Me 42, Pagat and the rest — is now a section of the rule book itself, under Table Rules and on the How to play page.
• The game count on the stats page counts from the day the doors opened. The build's own tests had been feeding it.

1.84.02026-09-04

The morning's screenshots: a Fives board that vanished, a scorepad the height of your hand, a Moon table that holds still, and the played tricks laid across the dock.

• Fives: picking a bone no longer empties the board. With no double down yet and the left end open, every bone on the table collapsed into one glowing chip the moment you picked. Fixed, and the suite that missed it now fails on exactly that.
• Fives' scorepad on a desktop is exactly as tall as the two rows of your hand, which gives the table the strip under your bones back.
• Moon holds still. Your name, your face and the table's sentence no longer shift when a bid lands or a message passes; the messages stack upward above the sentence instead.
• Moon's played tricks, and 42's, run across the dock from the left corner, one column a trick, the bones as big as the column allows. The hand just played in Moon is one column of seven.
• Bid shields fit their text everywhere. On a phone a bid reads as its number and a named contract as its name; "Shoot the Moon" reads MOON.
• Moon's scorepad after a hand is the right size, in the middle.

1.83.02026-09-03

Small things on the phone, and Taroky explains itself.

• The first lead sits dead centre on a 360 phone — it was a dozen pixels to the right, and now the two side bones lean out by the same amount.
• Fives in Big print fits a 360 phone at the start of a hand, without the scroll it had.
• The +5 in Fives lands above the board, not on the bone you just played, and a second one steps sideways.
• Taroky says what "to 12" means — game points, one from each defender to the declarer or back again, plus each bonus — on the score and on the intro card; and it says why two cards in your hand wear a gold edge: they are the Trull.
• The rule book is straight about the draft: at a Czech table all four play every hand; dealing three-handed is this app's simplification.

1.82.02026-09-03

The desktop, looked at again: the table's furniture where it belongs.

• LEAVE and TABLE RULES are a sensible size on a desktop — still the brand's face, no longer the loudest thing on the screen.
• You sit a third of the way in from the left and the table's sentence a third in from the right, just above the dock, on all four tables.
• The other players' dominoes are bigger on a desktop, and each one is centred under its player, with the count off to the right.
• 42's dock: the bid chip, GAME and HAND on one line, one height, one size, centred over your bones — and your bones centred on the table. On the widest screens the talk panel now sits under the scorepad.
• Fives' dock row is centred over the bones too.
• Bid shields no longer truncate on a desktop (SHOOT THE MOON, BID 30 · BLANKS).
• The ring key from the night before is gone.

1.81.12026-09-03

Where else to play, where you can find it.

• The list of other places to play 42 online is at the foot of How to play now — the page you are on when you want it — rather than on a page nothing linked to.

1.81.02026-09-03

The count is on, and the notice is up.

• Game Stats counts everywhere now. When a hand finishes, a game is won or a trick is taken, your phone adds one to its tally and, when it has a signal, sends the numbers — the name of the game and three small counts, nothing about you — to one total for everybody. The privacy page says exactly what goes and what does not. Hands you played before this build are sent the next time the app opens online.
• © 2026 Texas Bones, LLC at the foot of every page.

1.80.02026-09-03

The night's second cut: room between the bones, the brand's face on every device, and a hand you can deal again.

• More room between your bones on a phone, thicker count and trump rings, and a small key under the hand while a ring shows.
• The bid panel's history no longer fades; 42 is gold, Pass is red.
• LEAVE and TABLE RULES match the wordmark, and headings, buttons and chips are in the brand's typeface on every phone — it ships with the app.
• Fives: your partner stands with a PARTNER banner; you sit at the left, the table's sentence at the right; the glowing ends are the size and place of the bone that would land there.
• Taroky: you at the left, the sentence at the right.
• Moon: the bid is said once, on the bidder's disc, larger.
• 42 on a desktop: your plate under the left seat, the sentence under the right, the scorepad's marks at every width, the bid chip back above your hand.
• Replay a hand: a hand key on the end-of-hand card; paste it on the setup screen for the same deal.
• Carry your profile to a new phone as a file. No account.
• Where else to play 42 online, on the Where to Play page.
• The Back bar matches the panel; Start here on the 42 card for a first visit; the saved tables row is current when you come home; a failed rejoin says why.

1.79.02026-09-03

The phone, looked at again the night before the doors open — and Taroky's card back is the Bohemian lion.

• Opponents on a phone read as a column — face, name, domino, count, each centred on the one above.
• The bid is said once. The shield on the bidder's disc carries it; the chip above your hand no longer repeats it.
• TABLE RULES is the same height as LEAVE on every table.
• What's been played, on a phone: bigger bones, and all seven tricks on the sheet without scrolling.
• Back is a bar across the foot of the rules screens rather than a floating button.
• Fives on a phone: you sit bottom-left, the table's sentence sits bottom-right, and your partner is directly under the header.
• Moon on a phone: the sentence sits above the played bones instead of across them, the scorepad is gone (the SCORE chip says it), and the chips under your hand are one size.
• Taroky on a phone: the card back is the Bohemian lion on red, twice the size; your hand runs eight across; and the Pass button is on the screen.
• The version tag stands in the bottom-right corner of every table, and is off the home screen, whose footer already says it.

1.78.02026-09-03

The phone pass before the doors open, Game Stats, and the relay keeps the host's id to itself.

• The bid panel fits a phone. Four across, so 42 and Pass are on the screen at 360 wide with Big print on; where a short phone still cannot fit it, a fade at the foot says there is more below.
• Your own seat no longer shows a domino back and a count — your bones are right there in front of you. The count had read 0 of 7 on every table.
• The table's commentary stays in the middle on a phone instead of piling onto the played bones, and the bid shield reads 30 · ACES there rather than being cut off.
• Fives' Compact view overlaps a quarter of each bone, never half.
• Taroky fits a laptop. The cards take a size from the window's height, and the three other players sit across the top lying down.
• The player sitting out a Taroky hand says SITS OUT, not AWAY.
• The scorepad in Big print no longer sits on the Score button on a phone.
• Game Stats. A page, linked next to Privacy, counting games, hands and tricks finished per game — on this device today, and everywhere once the count is switched on.
• The version sits in the bottom-right corner of every screen, small, for screenshots.

1.77.02026-08-27

The seat cards, redrawn — and the back button works again.

• Every player's seat is redrawn. A circle with their face, the shaker and bid banners welded to it, their name, their own domino back and their count. Opponents stand up; your partner lies on his side across the top, which is how you tell at a glance who your partner is.
• The bid says what was bid — "Bid 31 · Sixes", "2 Marks · Nel-O" — on a gold shield under the bidder's face, instead of a bare BID tag.
• Whose turn it is is a red ring that pulses, one seat at a time.
• The BACK button at the top of a page takes a click again. It looked fine and only responded if you came at it from below.
• Every button is in the same typeface, weight and size — in the app and on the pages alike. BACK was in a different face from the button above it.
• The bottom of the table stops moving when your hand loses a row.
• The dock's chips line up, at one height and one text size.
• The end of a hand shows four things: the header, the result, the hand you just played in two columns with bigger bones, and the scorepad.
• 42 drops the DOWN tag. Shaker and bidder are the two that mean something at that table. Fives keeps it.
• "later" now says "to be added later".

1.76.02026-08-27

Big print stops making things small.

• The other players' dominoes no longer cover their names. In Big print they were running backwards out of their own pile and across the seat.
• The other players' dominoes are much bigger — and bigger in Big print than without it, which is the way round it should always have been.
• A real gap between the bones in your hand, and it stays a gap when a bone is ringed or selected.
• The table's message sits in the middle of the table, above trick N of 7, at a size you can read across a room. The played bones make room for it rather than landing on it.
• The PLAYED record reaches the bottom corner, holds all seven tricks without scrolling, and stays off the players' chips.
• Your name and the bid chip beside it are the same size.
• On Fives your name is in the dock on a desktop, not on the felt, and the Board view switch sits clear of the line above it with a label you can read.
• More room under the scorepad.

1.75.02026-08-26

One seat, designed once, on every table.

• Every player's seat is the same thing now — face, name, pencil, SHAKER and BID, their bones and their count, laid out one way on all four tables. It was built five separate ways before this, which is why fixing one table kept breaking another.
• Their dominoes sit next to their names, at every screen size.
• Nothing in a seat moves any more — not when a badge arrives, not when a bone is played, not when a count gains a digit. Every part of a seat has a space kept for it whether it is being used or not.
• Whose turn it is is a notch down the left edge of their seat, lit when it is on them. The little brass marker that slid across the table is gone; it kept landing on somebody's bones.
• Moon's seats say how many tricks each player has taken.
• Your partner holds a pile now, like everybody else.

1.74.12026-08-27

could legally play was outlined in the same gold as the count ring — so

• The play aids tell two things apart again. In Big print, every bone you could legally play was outlined in the same gold as the count ring — so "you may play this" and "this one carries count" were one colour, and a whole hand looked flagged. The legal-play ring is neutral ink now; gold still means count and only count.
• The training-hand offer moved below the games and grew a way out. It is a slim outlined pill rather than a gold slab, and there is an × for anyone who has played 42 since before the app existed — it says where the hand lives afterwards, and it stays hidden.
• Fives' board-view switch sits a few pixels higher, level with your name.

1.74.02026-08-26

A pass through the decided things.

• New players get a front door. A gold banner above the game cards — "New to 42? Play the five-minute training hand" — straight into the tutorial, shown only until you have sat at any table, then gone forever.
• The 42 played-record has a dedicated space that fills, so all seven tricks fit with no scrollbar.
• The setup screen reads in two groups: Shape of the game and House extras — the same rules, finally sorted.
• Online play asks one question at a time: one Set up a table button, then which game.
• Fives' board-view slider sits in line with your name chip.
• The scorepad keeps a gap from the bottom of the page, and the wordmark is twice the size on a desktop table.
• Moon's piles stack under their own names.

1.73.02026-08-25

The player's-eye review, acted on: two bugs closed, five decided things done,

• The page can no longer scroll mid-hand on Fives. The scorepad grows all game and was quietly pushing the whole page past the window; the table owns the screen now and the board gives instead — which is the machinery it already had.
• The photo tile says what it does: Add photo when empty, Remove photo when set, and the duplicate row of buttons below it is gone.
• The other players' backs are bigger again — the design on them is the point — with a size for wide screens and a size for the middle ones, so the seat row keeps its room.
• Your own bones get more air, and the scorepad keeps a proper distance.
• Table Talk is gone from solo games. A box explaining that there is nobody to talk to was a caption on an impossibility.
• The partner's name has stopped twitching for good — its plate sits in a reserved slot no layout arithmetic can move.
• The gathered trick keeps vanishing crisply — considered, and kept as is.
• The BONUS! star on Taroky stays exactly as it is.

1.72.22026-08-25

printing BACK in the chip's own gold — invisible ink, there all along.

• The BACK chip at the top of every page has its word back. It was printing BACK in the chip's own gold — invisible ink, there all along.
• The pages read like pages on a big screen: a wider column, larger type, and the wordmark half again bigger at the top.
• The top BACK stays put now instead of following you down the page — asked for, seen, and unasked, which is how it should work.

1.72.12026-08-25

edge of the window. It had escaped the page's column — along with everything

• The bottom BACK on the long pages sits with the text, not at the far edge of the window. It had escaped the page's column — along with everything after it — through one stray </div> that had been closing the column early since before the column was ever blamed.

1.72.02026-08-23

The day the game got looked at — at the widths people actually play at, in the

• The middle widths work. Between a phone and a wide monitor there was a band — about 900 to 1500 pixels — where 42's scorepad sat on your hand, the page scrolled, Taroky stacked sixteen cards four deep off the screen, and the bid buttons hid in a corner. All of it is fixed, and every width is now photographed before a release rather than assumed.
• Moon and Taroky sit at the bottom of the window like every table should, with the felt above them — no more band floating mid-screen over dead green.
• The bone backs are big, on every table, and a hand face-down is a real pile now: edges peeking out under the top bone, countable at a glance. They were the smallest thing on the table and they are part of the charm.
• Compact means compact — half of every bone tucks under its neighbour.
• Your name and icon sit in the dock on a computer, next to the bid chip, where your eyes already are. Phones keep the plate on the felt.
• The played-tricks record fills the left side of the screen on a computer instead of squinting out of a corner box with a scrollbar. Seven tricks fit without touching anything.
• The table stops fidgeting. Opponents' piles keep one width from seven bones to none, so names and counts stay planted; Taroky's dock holds one height from bid to last trick; the partner's fan keeps daylight between its bones and clear of everything around it.
• RULES is now TABLE RULES, because it opens this table's house rules, not a rulebook.
• BACK is a gold chip everywhere in the app and on every page of the site — and on the long pages it rides along as you scroll, so the way out is always in reach. The Hall and Slate keep their own quieter style for now.
• The Battle of Gonzales back is printed on the bone — the white card behind it is gone.
• Moon's messages are table talk, not popups — the black pill is gone; the words just appear on the felt and fade.
• The release notes on the site tell whole sentences again. The last two releases' notes were being cut to their first line each — a parser kept only the first physical line of every bullet, and these notes wrap.
• The count and trump helper rings are thicker, so you can tell they are on.
• Your own hand breathes a little more on a desktop.

1.71.02026-08-22

Thirty of the forty things off the last two days of screenshots — six ways the

• Taroky stops dealing you out of the opening hand. The dealer sits out the hand they deal, and you were the dealer every time a game started. You play the first three now and sit out the fourth.
• The table stops saying everything twice. Waiting on Bobo and Ed names sixes used to arrive on top of each other; on Moon it happened every single turn.
• Looking at the table no longer costs you the panel. On Fives, switching Normal and Compact after a hand used to throw the result back over the board you had just asked to see.
• Ed and Becky have their names back. They had been reduced to a face and a pencil, and your partner's name vanished whenever he was also the shaker. Their chips stay inside their own seats now instead of hanging out the bottom.
• Everyone's bones are a neat pile — one bone's footprint, with the edges of the ones underneath showing, so you can count them without a number. On Fives that means all three opponents have their bones back on a phone; two of them used to be hidden entirely for want of room.
• Nothing lands on your name plate on Fives any more. The board and the Knock button both used to draw straight through it. All three have their own space at the foot of the table now.
• Compact view overlaps half as much, and Normal doesn't overlap at all — measured over eighty boards.
• The play-here markers line up with the board. They were bigger than the line they were marking.
• The table's mark holds still. It was breathing in and out as the table changed shape through a hand.
• Moon and Taroky are not mostly empty green. The table is the size of what is on it.
• Taroky's dock stays one size all game, its bid choices are centred with Pass among them, and sixteen cards lie in one row on a computer and four by four on a phone. The cards are bigger again.
• Moon's played bones are the size of something you are meant to read, and its trick counters say tricks instead of being a bare number.
• First shake and First play are in your profile, so your house's opening convention is remembered instead of chosen every game.
• Your own plate no longer says SHAKER — you know.
• The score pop on Fives is a number arriving rather than an announcement.

1.70.02026-08-22

Thirty-two things off two evenings of screenshots — two tables you could get

• Two ways to get stuck are gone. The bid panel could be dismissed — a back gesture was enough — and nothing brought it back, so it stayed your bid forever with no way to make one. And a hand that ended on Fives could follow you to the home screen, offering to shake a table you had already left.
• The table talks in one place now. Waiting on Bobo and Ed names sixes used to arrive on top of each other from two different corners. Everything the table has to say now appears in the middle of it: what it is waiting for stays put, and things that just happened appear underneath and fade, so two in a row can both be read.
• You and your partner sit at opposite ends properly. His bones are up under the top bar and his name is below them, facing you across the table.
• Ed and Becky's chairs read on one line — face, name, then SHAKER and BID. Their chips used to sit underneath, where they landed on your partner's bones or ran off the side of the screen.
• The pencil for renaming them is white and easy to find, and sits right after the name. It was gold at nearly half transparency on a green table.
• Everybody's face is the same size. Yours and your partner's were bigger than Ed's and Becky's.
• The played bones sit further in, so the one on your right no longer lands under Becky's hand. And nothing is labelled with a name any more, at any point in the trick.
• You sit at your end of the table in every game, not just 42 — Fives, Moon and Taroky have their name plates off the dock and on the felt now.
• Taroky finally has a layout. The band at the bottom used to float in the middle of the screen with an empty table under it, your score was jammed against the right edge, and at bid time the choices sat in one corner while your name, your score and your cards piled up in the other. Cards, names and text are all bigger too.
• The scorepad lies on its side on a phone — Us on the left, Them on the right — so it takes half the height and both words are big enough to read.
• The score chips are one size in every game. That fix reached 42 last release and nothing else.
• "trick 6 of 7" is readable on Moon and Taroky, as it already was on 42.
• The Hall looks like somebody chose it. The pink headings are white, the selected settings are white instead of gold, and the 42% Pledge and Privacy pages are black type on parchment rather than cream on cream.
• Slate has no yellow left in it. The four game titles on the home screen were a warm cream that no theme could reach.
• LEAVE, RULES and BACK, in capitals, on one line, with no arrow and no clipboard.
• Your hand keeps its space as you play it. The bottom of the screen used to lose a row halfway through a hand and everything above it jumped down.
• On a phone, the other players hold a neat pile of bones rather than a spread of seven, with the count beside it — and that count is bigger.
• The record of the hand fills its panel on a desktop instead of sitting small in a lot of empty green, and the scorepad no longer sits on top of your bones — below a certain width it was running off the screen entirely.
• The setup screen reads properly. Save these as my go-to rules has moved up to sit with the rules it saves, instead of being sandwiched between two big buttons, and the buttons below are no longer competing with Shake 'em!
• Pass the phone is Pass the device, because it works just as well on a laptop passed round a table.

1.69.02026-08-20

Your bones fill the row at last, the regulars are Ed, Bobo and Becky, and a button's colour finally means one thing.

• The gaps between your dominoes are gone. Your hand fills the bottom of the screen, four across, at every phone size. This was reported three times and fixed twice without ever being fixed — the cause was not the size of the bones.
• Meet Ed, Bobo and Becky. The three regulars have new names, and Bobo is your partner. If you had already renamed one of them yourself, your name is kept.
• Bots at a shared table are Bot Ed, Bot Bobo, Bot Becky and Bot Hank, one to a chair.
• The score chips read as one thing each. GAME was smaller than the score beside it and sat visibly higher; everything in a chip is now one size, with the label still told apart by its capitals and its weight.
• A button's colour means one thing now. A filled button is something to press; an outlined one is the setting you have chosen. They used to be the same colour, so the profile had twenty-five things that looked like the main action and the home screen had none.
• Leave and Rules are bigger, and in the colour of the table you are playing on — gold at The Club, maroon at Northgate, navy at The Hall, pale blue on Slate.
• Big print gives you three bones to a row instead of four, so they are a third larger again.
• The save these as my go-to rules button has a border you can actually see.

1.68.02026-08-20

The table stops running out of room on a phone, the regulars can be given your own names, and a hand that ended can no longer strand you.

• A hand that ended could leave you stuck. Look at the table after the last trick, then open the record, then close it — and the panel with Shake 'em! on it was gone, with nothing to bring it back. The hand was over, the score was counted, and the only way on was to leave the table. Fixed.
• You can rename Buck, Amos and Darlene. There is a small pencil beside each of them at the table — tap it, type, done. It is kept on your phone and nowhere else. Leave it empty to put the original name back.
• Bots at a shared table have names now. Three empty chairs used to show three players all called Bot, with nothing to tell them apart. They are Bot – Jan, Bot – Bobo, Bot – Dot and Bot – Hank, by chair, so the same chair is the same bot on everybody's screen.
• Your partner holds his bones like a hand instead of a rack — four above, three below, tucked under. Seven in a line across the top of a phone was the tightest fit on the table, which is why his were always the smallest. Two rows need about half the width, so they are half again as big.
• Every bone that is not in your hand is now one size — both players either side, your partner, and the ones played in the middle. They were three different sizes before.
• Your own bones fill the row. They were sized against the width of the window rather than the width of the row they sit in, which is why they looked right on some phones and left gaps on others.
• You sit at your end of the table. Your name and face have come off the dock and onto the felt just above it, where the turn marker already was — the two read as one thing now, and your bones got the row back.
• The hand just played is much easier to read on a phone. The bones are close to twice the size, it says which rows are yours and which are theirs, and Close has moved to the bottom-left where a thumb is.
• "trick 6 of 7" is readable, and no longer breaks onto two lines in the middle of the table.
• The score and bid chips read as one thing each. They were running three type sizes at once, and "Buck bid30" had no space in it.
• The names under the bones played in the middle have gone — at a 42 table the seat already says whose it is.
• On a desktop: the trick counter is the size of the seat names instead of the smallest thing on the felt, the other players' bones are larger, and the record of the hand no longer scrolls.
• The setup screen says less, Pass the phone is a plain Off / On, and the profile is one column again with the row of faces no longer cut off at the edge.
• The 42% Pledge and the Support panel have been rewritten, and every page on the site now wears the table you are playing on and carries the flag.

1.67.02026-08-20

Online tables play again, the training hand stops moving its own buttons, and every page finally looks like the table you chose.

• Tables with a filled seat in them stopped dead. Open a table over the internet with a bot in one of the chairs and the game froze the moment it was that bot's turn — no message, nothing to press, the table just stopped. Every online game with an empty chair was affected. Fixed.
• A new bone back: De Zavala. The 1836 flag — a white star on azure with TEXAS set one letter to a gap between the points, so the word turns with the star. It takes Blue Star's place. If Blue Star was yours, you'll find Texas Bones selected instead.
• The home screen no longer jumps when you change tables. Switch from The Club to Northgate and everything used to slide down a line, because each table's tagline is its own sentence and only The Club's fits on one line. The furniture holds still now whatever the sentence says.
• In the training hand, Back and Next stay exactly where they are. The panel used to shrink between notes and take its buttons up the screen with it, so the thumb that pressed Next had to go looking for it every other tap. It is anchored now, and it sits just above your hand instead of at the top of the phone, next to the bones it is talking about.
• Bigger bones on a wide phone. Anything from about 412 pixels across was drawing a narrower phone's bones and leaving room on the table.
• "Pass the phone" is a switch. It used to say SHOW and open a panel, which described what the widget did rather than what the setting was. It reads Off / On like every other rule on that screen, and only asks how many of you turned up once it is on.
• The profile is one column again, and the row of faces is no longer cut off at the edge on a desktop.
• Every page on the site now wears the table you are playing on — the real felt, the real wood, the real slate, not a flat approximation of it. And each one is headed by the flag lockup instead of plain type.
• The lobby shows your bone backs as backs. It was a row of names — Texas Bones, Lone Star, Big T — for a choice entirely about what they look like.
• Two buttons showed an empty box instead of a domino on Android, where the font has no such character. The boxes are gone.
• The game cards say what you are about to do. Shake 'em! on the three domino games, Deal 'em! on Taroky, in place of Set up the table.
• Support and the 42% Pledge have been rewritten, and the Pledge now says plainly that everything — tips and the store both — falls under it.
• AI difficulty shows one description, the one you picked, instead of all three at once.
• The plate of food on The Hall's table now has chips that look like chips, fish that looks like fish, and a little tub of tartar sauce instead of an unidentifiable white blob.
• The setup screen says less: a one-line heading, and save these as my go-to rules is a link rather than a button competing with Shake 'em!
• Texas Bones, LLC is the publisher on the site now that the company is granted.

1.66.02026-08-19

The app stops being wider than the phone it is on, the bots explain themselves on one page, and a desktop finally gets used like a desktop.

• The app was wider than your phone, and that was the whole centring problem. On some phones — Android especially — panels sat off to one side, the page could be pinched about, and the whole thing looked slightly off-centre in a way that was hard to point at. The app was measuring 450 pixels wide on a 390-pixel screen, so everything was being centred on a page wider than the glass. Nothing was ever wrong with the panels themselves.
• And switching tables no longer nudges the page. Same cause: the page's width came out slightly different on each table, so the phone's zoom-to-fit changed by about one percent when you switched.
• Splash, Plunge and Sevens work properly now. All three showed neither Off nor On selected, they were missing from your profile, and save these as my go-to rules did not carry them. They have a default, they have a row in the profile with the other house rules, and they travel to the next table with everything else.
• The home screen carries the flag. The wordmark at the top is now the lockup with the Texas flag tile in it, in a light or dark cut depending on which table you are sitting at.
• Normal is the board's default view again. The tighter board is still there behind the switch, but Normal is what you get. The switch itself is bigger and sits where you can find it.
• Everything about the computer players is on one page now. How it works used to be a long panel, with a shorter card inside it, and a page on the website saying overlapping things. It is one page: what the bots do, the three levels, the measurements, what is still wrong with them, and what we are trying to get to. It still opens with no signal.
• One Back button on a phone, at the bottom where your thumb is. The profile had one at the very top and another at the very bottom, and neither was where your hand was. There is one now, pinned to the bottom-left corner, on every screen you can be deep inside.
• The house rules and the profile use the desktop they are on. They were a single narrow column you scrolled through, with a third of the screen doing nothing beside it. Two columns, full width, about a third less scrolling on each. The little descriptions under each rule are still there — they are how you find out what Plunge is while you are deciding whether to switch it on.
• There is a store page. It is not open, and it says so. Nothing sold there will ever be part of the game.

1.65.02026-08-18

The training hand explains every bone you play, the Fives board lays its doubles the way a table does, and the desktop stops reading like a phone held at arm's length.

• The training hand has been rewritten. It had two things wrong with it, both of which a beginner would have noticed: it named the wrong player as having passed, and it said you had made your bid a trick before you had. Both fixed. It now says something about every bone you play rather than three of the seven — including the moment the hand is actually won, where leading your own 6-4 into a trick you cannot lose forces out a five and lands sixteen points in one go. And it explains the bid properly: what you hold, what you expect to give away, and why 30 is the careful number rather than the brave one.
• And it gets out of your way while the table moves. Between the moments worth explaining, the panel shrinks to a bar with Next on it, so you can watch the bones and the marker instead of reading over them. Reading and watching were fighting for the same screen.
• Doubles on the Fives board lie across the line, the way they do on a table. A double that turned a corner was being drawn lying the same way as the bone it joined, which no double ever does. A double is laid crossways to the run it joins and does not turn the line; the next bone turns the corner, and may then lie alongside the double.
• A Compact / Normal switch for the board. The tighter board that arrived last release stays the default, because there is no width at which it is worse — but it is your choice now. The switch is beside the board on a desktop and above your hand on a phone.
• At the end of a hand the record is one panel instead of two. The small corner record used to sit underneath the big one showing the same seven tricks again. The big one now takes the room, is sized to where the score panel actually begins rather than to a fixed third of the table, fits without scrolling, and carries a key saying which rows are yours — which was never written down anywhere.
• And the record is readable during the hand. Its bones now grow with the space its column has, which on a wide screen is about a third larger than they were.
• Bigger bones in your hand, a little closer together, at every phone size.
• The desktop is set for a desktop. Names, badges, the status line and the score are all larger; the three Fives seats lie along their row instead of stacking a name above a fan, which hands about fifty pixels of height back to the felt.
• The record no longer follows you home. Finish a hand, leave the table, and The hand just played used to still be sitting over the home screen.

1.64.02026-08-17

Somebody will walk you through a hand of 42 now, and the Fives board stops drawing everything so small.

• New to 42? Play a training hand. There is a button at the top of How to Play that deals one hand — the same hand every time — and walks you through it a move at a time, with somebody explaining what is happening and why. The auction, naming trumps, why you lead the double of your own trump, what count is and where 42 comes from, and what a mark is. You do not have to play anything: you press Next, and you can press Back when you want to see a trick again. It ends with you taking all forty-two, because the first hand anybody is shown should not be a close one.
• The bones on the Fives board are much bigger. They were being drawn small enough to squint at once a board got going — a quarter of the way through a hand they were half the size they should have been. The board now lays the line up more tightly, which leaves far more room for each bone: about a quarter to a third larger for most of a hand, and the fullest boards benefit most. Nothing is hidden by it. Bones in a line always meet on matching numbers, so the only thing ever tucked under a neighbour is a number that neighbour is showing you anyway.
• You can see all three of the other players on the Fives table. On a phone two of them were off the side of the screen for the first half of every hand, which is why it looked as though it only happened sometimes — by the end everyone's hand is small enough to fit. Now the opposition show their name and how many bones they are still holding, which is what you actually need from them, and your partner still shows their bones face down.
• The score under your hand no longer wraps in Big print. Game and Hand were dropping onto two lines on every phone size, which cost a whole band of height right where there is least to spare. They have never fitted in Big print; nobody had measured it.
• See played, and your bid, sit side by side. They were two separate rows above your bones. They are one row now, as a matched pair, and See played is drawn as something you press rather than as a heading. Your name plate underneath no longer jumps about when SHAKER, BID and DOWN all turn up at once.
• The marker showing whose turn it is sits properly in the middle at your end of the table, instead of half on top of the row above your bones.

1.63.02026-08-16

Panels keep hold of their own Close button, the rule book stops hiding Taroky, and the table says less.

• The Close button was outside the box. At the bottom of How it works — and worse on the bots card, where several buttons hung below it — the panel's own buttons sat on the felt underneath it. Not merely off the bottom: nothing would scroll down to them, so they could not be reached at all.
• Taroky was off the edge of the rule book. The four games across the top of How to play ran past the right of a phone screen, so the last of them could not be tapped. They sit two-by-two now, and the title has stopped wrapping onto three lines.
• "Tournament" no longer spills out of its own button. The three rules presets were sharing a phone screen three across, and the longest of the three words did not fit what that left. Two across.
• The row of names across the top of the table has gone from the phone. It listed the four of you in playing order — which is clockwise in 42, counterclockwise in Fives, and the same every hand of your life. Whose turn it is is still said twice: by the token that travels to their seat, and by your own name plate, which breathes when the table is waiting on you. It came off laptops in v1.55.0 for this reason and the phone was held back; the phone is where it was least wanted.
• The badges under Buck and Darlene can be read. SHAKER, BID and DOWN were set smaller than anything else on the table — squeezed side by side into a column narrower than the pair of them. They stack now, one under another, and they are larger than the ones on your own plate rather than half the size.
• The game score is spaced like the hand score. The two sat side by side under your bones reading "Us0 · Them0" and "Us 0 · Them 6".
• "Pass the phone" is now called Pass the phone. It asked "Passing one phone round the table?" — a question doing a label's job, and two lines of it on a phone. Its SHOW control also sat outside the box it belongs to, on the Fives setup screen as well as the 42 one.
• Muggins is off the Fives rules screen. It was listed as something the full app would do. There is no full app and no other version — this is it, all of it, and there is nothing else to buy. A rule you cannot switch on is not a feature, and it comes back as a working switch or not at all.
• Saving your go-to rules is a quieter button now, so it stops competing with Shake 'em! for the same glance.

1.62.02026-08-15

You can start a table on your own with the bots in the empty chairs. And "Table Talk" is back.

• Starting a table with three bots works. Turn on Fill the rest with bots, press Shake 'em!, and it shakes. Until now it told you nobody else had sat down yet and refused — even though it was the app that had just offered you the button.
• The chat panel is called "Table Talk" again. It was renamed to Table Chat in the last release on the grounds that table talk means signalling your partner, which is cheating. That was the joke, and renaming it removed the joke.
• The glossary now carries both meanings in one entry — the real one, which is what a serious table plays quiet to avoid, and the app's, named after it on purpose.

1.61.02026-08-15

How 42 is actually played — the habits that usually get passed across a table rather than written down.

• Bid on what you expect to lose. The rules used to say to count what you can win, which is what beginners do and is the harder question. Good players go the other way: mark what you expect to give away, take it off 42. And count those losses in points, not tricks — a trick you lose is worth 1, a trick you lose with the 6-4 in it is worth 11. Two hands with the same number of losers can be twenty points apart.
• A new section: how the game is actually played. Throwing count to your partner and never to the other side. Opening at the minimum when your hand is thick with count — worth about seventeen games in a hundred, by our own measurements. Contesting a bid you think is thin. Holding your trumps on defence. Remembering who fought the auction and who passed. And two things that sound clever and lose: calling the special contracts on a thin hand, and walking trump past the last one out.
• The privacy page has been rewritten, and it is shorter and true. It now says exactly what stays on your device, what the table relay holds while a hand is going and how long it keeps it, that tables have chat and that you can mute anybody, and that there are two hosts rather than one. The old page said nothing was ever sent anywhere and that there was no chat — neither had been true since online play shipped.
• "Table talk" means what it means at a real table again. It is signalling your partner, and it is cheating. The chat in this app is now called Table chat everywhere, which is what the lobby already called it.
• Your saved tables take two lines instead of three — name and game on the first, code beneath in small grey type — so more of them fit before the list starts scrolling.
• New words in the glossary for things the app invented: the rail, covering a chair, taking a bone back, table chat.

1.60.02026-08-15

The Fives table's buttons are the right size, and it shows the table's name.

• Leave and Rules on the Fives table were enormous. Four and a half times the width they should be — not a font-size problem but a layout one, and the same bug was waiting on the Moon and Taroky tables. Fixed everywhere.
• The Fives table now shows the table's name, in the top bar beside Leave, the way the 42 table does. It never had one. The name is bigger on both.

1.59.02026-08-15

If your hand ever looks wrong, the app now notices and can tell us exactly what happened.

• A hand that cannot be dealt is now caught by the app itself. One player, once, saw every bone in their hand ringed gold as though all seven carried count. Only five bones in the whole set carry count, so that hand is not unlucky — it is impossible. If it ever happens again, a red "That looks wrong — copy the details" button appears, and one tap puts everything the app was holding onto your clipboard to paste into a message. Nothing is sent anywhere on its own — there is no tracking in this app and this is not where that would start.

1.57.12026-08-15

Taking a bone back now actually takes it back on everybody's screen.

• A fix to yesterday's take-back, found within the hour. The table agreed, the relay dropped the bone from its record — and every screen carried on showing it. Nothing looked wrong, which is the problem: the app and the relay quietly disagreed about what had been played.

1.57.02026-08-15

Take a bone back if the table agrees, sit down at a game already going, and a laptop table you can read.

• You can take a bone back, if the table says yes. Play the wrong one and there's a quiet I misclicked on screen for as long as it can honestly be offered — your bone, and only while nobody has played after you. Everybody still at the table has to agree, and if somebody would rather play it as it lies, that's a fair answer and nobody is told who said so. A bid can't be taken back: three other people have already bid against it.
• You can sit down at a table that's already going. Start a table with the bots in the empty chairs, send the code round, and people take those chairs as they turn up. Somebody arriving mid-hand lands at the rail watching, the way they always did — but now there's a Take a chair button, and taking one puts you in from the next bone with the hand as it stands.
• Starting with bots is offered where you're waiting. A host sitting on their own is asked, right under the empty chairs, whether to start now. That was always possible — the switch is further down the lobby — but nobody could find it, which is the same thing as it not existing.
• The laptop table reads properly. The wordmark stays in the middle of the screen instead of drifting when the table's name is beside it, the name says Table: Rad Trads between Leave and the wordmark, Leave and Rules are bigger, your bones are bigger again, and the scorepad stands the height of the band. And the top of the screen stops saying Your bid. over an open bid panel.

1.56.02026-08-15

The table talks, the hand you just played scrolls, and a wide screen uses the room it has.

• Table talk is on the table. At an online table the last few lines sit in the bottom-right corner of the band, with the quick things people say on one row and a box to type in underneath. It was already built and already worked — but if you were playing the bots it showed a note saying chat would land there "when tables can be joined by code", which stopped being true the day codes shipped. Reading that in a bots game is what made a finished feature look like an unfinished one.
• The hand just played can be scrolled. It drew a gold scrollbar down the side and ignored it completely, so a hand that didn't quite fit was cut off at the last trick with no way to reach the rest.
• A wide screen lays the band out in four. What you've won, your hand, the scorepad, the talk — each with its own column, instead of the bones bunched to the left of a band with two empty thirds in it. Your hand sits in the middle of the room it has.

1.55.02026-08-15

Bigger bones on a phone, a cleaner table on a laptop, and the way out is always there.

• The bones on a phone got bigger, and the scorepad is why. It used to stand in a strip beside your hand, which meant the bones were sized to whatever was left over — four across at 82 pixels on a normal phone, with the right-hand edge of the screen given to a pad nobody looks at mid-hand. Now the score sits under your hand as one line, and tapping it swaps that line for the pad in the same space. Nothing else moves when you do it. The bones went to 92, four across, edge to edge — and on a bigger phone in Big print, over a hundred.
• The order down the screen makes sense now. Who you are and what has been bid on top, your bones in the middle, the score underneath. Your bones are between the two things you glance at instead of below both, so the thing you actually have to read is no longer the thing that got squeezed.
• The way out of a table is always where you left it. "← Leave" could be covered by the bid panel, or scrolled off the top of a short phone when the panel opened. It was fine on a big phone, which is why it looked like it only went wrong sometimes. It doesn't now, at any size, with any panel open.
• Fives has no scorepad on a phone. It is a running column of Xs that grows all game, and shrunk to fit a phone it was decoration rather than a score. The running total is on the status line where it always was. It is still there on a laptop.
• A laptop table has a lot less clutter on it. The table's name has moved up into the top bar. Four separate things were telling you whose turn it was — the travelling token, the lit name plate, a strip of names across the top and the words "Your play." — and the middle two have gone on wide screens, where the token is obvious. Instead your own name breathes gently when the table is waiting on you.
• Your partner reads as one row on a laptop — their name, then their bones — instead of a name on its own line above them, which took a band out of the middle of the table for no information. Your own bones are centred properly now, rather than sitting against the left edge with the right half of the dock empty.
• Starting a table with bots is offered where you're waiting. A host sitting on their own is asked, right under the empty chairs, whether to start now with the bots in them. This was always possible — the switch is further down the lobby — but nobody could find it, which is the same thing as it not existing.
• Bigger Leave and Rules buttons on a laptop, and the bar at the top of the lobby no longer hangs a few pixels past the corner of the panel it sits in.

1.54.02026-08-15

Send somebody the hand you just played, and watch a table you're not sitting at.

• The hand you just played, as something you can send. Tap Send this hand on the hand-over card and you get the whole thing written out — what was bid, every trick and who took it, whether the bid came home, and where the marks stand. It goes to a group chat and reads properly on a lock screen, so somebody can argue with you about the four you led without opening anything.
• You can watch a table that's already full. Open the code for a table with four people at it and you land at the table rather than at a closed door: the tricks, the score, who's playing what, live. You hold no bones, because you're not in the hand — you're at the rail.

1.53.02026-08-15

Everything the first real table asked for.

• The shake between hands works. If somebody's phone had died, or a bot was covering their chair, the table waited for a person who was never going to press anything — and leaving to the home screen and walking back in was the only way out. It moves on now, without the chairs nobody is sitting in.
• Your bones are much bigger on a phone. The hand sits above the scorepad instead of beside it, which hands it the whole width: bones went from 58 pixels to 82, and from 64 to 90 in Big print. Four then three, still nothing touching.
• The mark on the felt is gone from three of the four tables on a phone — it stays on The Hall, where it belongs, and on every table on a desktop. On a small screen it was sitting under your bones rather than behind a table.
• The chat bubble has stopped sitting on the Rules button. It lives under the trick record now.
• Everybody sees what the table is called. The name was drawn from each person's own profile, so three of the four saw their own — usually nothing at all — and only the host saw the real one.
• One button for your name, your face and your bone backs, in the lobby, where you notice you are still showing up as "You". It used to be a text box, a fold, and a walk back out to the profile screen.
• A panel you have open no longer closes when somebody talks, and neither does what you were half-way through typing into it.
• Your tables, tidied. The list is called Your Active Tables, keeps ten, shows three at a time and scrolls — so it can no longer push the games off the bottom of the screen. Each row carries its code in small type, because a table's name comes from whoever opened it and two of yours can easily be called the same thing. And there is an × to take one off the list.
• The home screen says less. Four links in the footer were doors to somewhere you could already get: the glossary is inside How to play, Contact is the Feedback button, What's new is the version at the bottom, and Where to play has nothing in it yet. The line about online tables being "on the way" has gone too — they arrived four releases ago.

1.52.02026-08-14

Updates got a lot smaller.

• The app arrives in parts now, so an update only fetches the parts that changed. A fix to the way something looks used to cost you the whole game again — a quarter of a megabyte, on whatever signal you happened to have. It now costs about a quarter of that, and a correction to the rule book costs a sixth. Nothing about the game itself changes; it just stops asking you to download all of it every time.

1.51.02026-08-14

Moon and Taroky come to the table, and the table stops needing its host.

• Moon and Taroky play online. All four games now, not two. Send the code the same way, sit down the same way. Moon is three-handed, so a Moon table draws three chairs and nobody can take a fourth that the game has no seat for.
• The table carries on when the host drops out. The empty chairs used to be played by the host's device, so if the host's phone died mid-hand the bots stopped and everybody sat waiting on a chair that was never going to move. They belong to the table now. If the host is gone for a minute, somebody still at the table takes over running it — never mid-hand, and it says who, out loud, because suddenly having buttons nobody told you about is worse than not having them.
• Your phone can tell you it's your turn. Face down on the table, in your pocket, another app open — the phone says so. Ask for it once from the lobby; it never asks on its own, and the tab title still does the job on a laptop.
• What this table has done. How the pairings have gone since you sat down: you and Buck, you and Darlene, won and lost, and how many were won from behind. It is the record of this table and it goes when the table goes — nothing follows anybody home, and there is still no account anywhere. A chair a bot was covering earns nobody a record.
• The invitation is where the table is. Send this table used to sit on the setup screen, before you had opened a table, taken a chair, or had a code to send — so it invited people to something that did not exist. It lives in the lobby now, where there is a real table with you sitting at it, and the setup screen points at the button that opens one.

1.50.02026-08-14

Copy the invitation, and see what the bots are actually doing.

• You can copy a table invitation now, not only share it. On a laptop there often isn't a share sheet at all, which left a host reading four words down the phone to three people. There's a Copy button beside every Send this table, it says Copied on itself rather than in a message that can land behind the share sheet, and it works on a page served from a file as well as from the web.
• The lobby's Copy button now copies. It said Copy the invitation and opened a share sheet — convenient on a phone, nothing at all on a laptop. Both are there now, and each does what it says.
• The bots have a card of their own. How they play, what they're measured at, and what they still can't do, on one screen you can read between hands — from How it works, or from the difficulty setting in your profile. You can send it to somebody, and there's a button that says one of them played it wrong, which is the thing we most want to hear.
• The numbers about the bots were in six places and disagreed in all six. The profile screen said Sharp wins about 56 games in 100 against Standard, the panel said 60, the website said 59. Every one of them was true when it was measured and out of date by the time the next one was. They're measured once and read everywhere now: Sharp beats Standard 59 in 100, Standard beats Easy 76, Sharp beats Easy 84, and a Sharp with everything that makes it Sharp switched off draws level at 51 — which is the row that makes the other three mean anything.

1.49.02026-08-14

The phone gets its own back.

• Your bones were being cut off on a phone, and the scorepad with them. A laptop change last release quietly overrode the phone sizes, so a 390px screen drew bones meant for a desktop — the fourth one ran off the edge and the scorepad vanished completely. Fixed, and there is now a check that would have caught it.
• Bigger bones on a phone — noticeably larger at every width, now there is room beside the scorepad rather than under it.
• You can look at the hand you just played on a phone. It was a laptop-only feature since the day it was built. Tap See the hand again on the hand-over card and the whole hand opens full screen, trick by trick, at a size you can actually read.
• Doubles turn corners properly on the Fives board. The awkward ones you've been seeing were a real geometry bug, not a spacing preference.

1.48.02026-08-14

Your table waits a fortnight. The hand waits five minutes.

• A table now lives for two weeks, so the one on your home screen is still there next Thursday with the same code and the same chairs.
• A hand left alone for five minutes clears itself, and everybody drops back to the lobby with their chairs still theirs. This app is for playing in the moment — a half-finished hand from Tuesday isn't worth resuming on Thursday, and now that's true rather than just something we say.
• Talking counts as playing. Four people deciding whether to have another hand don't lose the one they're in the middle of; any word or move from somebody in a chair keeps the table awake.

1.47.02026-08-14

Your tables are on the home screen.

• The tables you keep going back to are waiting for you. Sit down at an online table once and it appears at the top of the home screen — the game, the table's name, and how long ago you were there. One tap puts you back in it, with no code to re-text and nothing to set up again.
• It costs no account and tells nobody anything. The list is a handful of codes in your own browser. Nothing about it goes anywhere, and there is still no sign-in.
• It forgets, too. A table you deliberately leave from the lobby goes straight away. One you were put out of goes. Anything you haven't sat at for a fortnight goes. Leaving mid-hand does not — that chair is being held for you and walking back into it is the whole point.

1.46.02026-08-14

A chair somebody left, and a chair somebody should leave.

• A bot can sit in for somebody who has dropped out. Tap their name; the host can put one in the chair. It keeps the hand going and stands up the moment they come back — nobody has to ask it to, because the chair was never taken from them. It plays Sharp whatever the table is set to, on purpose: the person who just lost their partner didn't choose this, and giving them the weakest player on the roster would be punishing them for somebody else's signal.
• The host can put somebody out. They leave, and they can't come back to that table. It lasts exactly as long as the table does — a block here is not a judgement that follows anybody around.
• Being put out says so. Plainly, once, and then it stops trying to reconnect. Being removed and losing signal are different things, and only one of them is worth waiting through.

1.45.02026-08-14

Lock your phone, come back, and your hand is still there.

• You can rejoin a hand in progress. If your signal drops, your phone locks, or you close the tab by accident, opening the table again puts you back in your own chair with your own bones and the hand exactly where the other three are looking at it. It works even when the host was the one who dropped, which is the case that matters most and the one nothing else could have covered.
• Your bones still never leave your device. What comes back is the shuffle and the moves — a move is a bone somebody put on the table in front of everybody, and a shuffle is not a hand. Nobody's seven bones cross the wire, then or now.
• In Fives, the score at the top belonged to whoever sat in chair one. If you sat in an odd chair online, the pill said "Us" over the opposition's score — and disagreed with the strip right below it, which was correct. Also fixed on the blocked-hand card, which called the other side "Buck & Darlene" whoever was actually sitting there.

1.44.02026-08-14

There's a page that says how the bots play, and your bones got bigger.

• The dock is side by side on a laptop too — four bones on top, three underneath, with the scorepad beside them instead of under them. The side columns are untouched, so the played tricks and the chat keep exactly the room they had; the space came from stacking the pad, which never needed to be that wide.
• Bigger bones in your own hand. Yours is the one hand you read rather than glance at, and four across leaves the width to do it.
• The bid panel is a fifth larger on anything bigger than a phone. It's the one thing you read under time pressure with three people waiting, and it was sized like an ordinary dialogue box.
• How the bots play is a new page on the site: what the computer players do, what they can and can't see, how the three levels differ, and the measured numbers — including the one that says a control with its advantages switched off comes out level, which is what makes the other numbers mean anything. It ends with what's still wrong with them, because nobody else in this category will tell you that either.
• The bots' version number is on it, and in How it works inside the app, which now links out to the page.
• The page is published under CC BY 4.0 — quote it, republish it, build on it, as long as you say where it came from.

1.43.02026-08-14

Your bones get the room on a phone, and the chat says how many.

• The dock is side by side on a phone now — your seven bones on the left, four on top and three underneath, with the scorepad beside them instead of underneath. Stacked, the pad was a big object squeezing your hand into a thin strip, so the one thing you have to be able to read was the smallest thing on the screen. Reported twice from real games.
• Nothing overlaps. Not on the short edge, not on the long edge either. If four across means the bones are a little smaller, they are a little smaller — a hand where every bone is whole and separate beats a hand where they are bigger and touching.
• The chat button says how many you have missed, as a number rather than a dot. A dot tells you something happened; a number tells you whether it is worth stopping mid-bid for. It stops at 9+, because past that the exact figure has stopped meaning anything.

1.42.02026-08-14

Sharp stops and thinks. AI version 1.1.

• Sharp counts the hand out now. Once enough bones are down, it imagines the rest of the hand a few dozen different ways, plays each one out to the end, and makes the play that came out best across all of them — which is what a good player is doing when they pause at trick four. Measured over 300 whole games with the seats swapped: it beats an otherwise identical Sharp that doesn't think, 60 games in 100.
• Standard and Easy still play by feel, on purpose. The three levels are meant to be three kinds of player rather than one player with a dial on them, and a family player doesn't stop and count the hand out either.
• The bots have their own version number now, separate from the app's. It moves when the way they play changes and stands still through everything else, because "which build is this" and "which opponent am I sitting across from" are different questions. There's a document, AI.md, written to be published: what the bots do, what a strong human does, how the three levels differ, and where ours are still wrong.
• It still cannot see your bones, and the test that proves it now covers the new code too.

1.41.22026-08-14

The good dog is back on the rail.

• REVEILLE ♥ is carved on the Northgate table again. Last version took it off with the borrowed slogans; it doesn't belong with them. A name in a heart is not a slogan, and it's the warmest thing on that rail.

1.41.12026-08-14

Nothing on the table borrows anybody's name.

• One carving on the Northgate rail changed. It named a real mascot. The rail is meant to read like decades of hands, not like a licensing agreement, and the replacement does the same job.
• The rooms describe themselves by colour, not by whose colour it is. No change to a single pixel — the same maroon and the same navy — just the way they're written down.

1.41.02026-08-14

Your trumps mark themselves, and the tab tells you when the table is waiting.

• Your trumps are ringed, once trump is named. A dashed red ring, next to the solid gold one the count dominoes already had — and a bone that is both gets red dashes over gold, so it says both things at once. Solid against dashed is the part doing the work: for the eight men in a hundred who see red and gold as much the same colour, the line still tells them apart. Off in your profile if you'd rather sort your own hand, same as the count ring.
• A tab that says "Your turn". In an online game, when the table is waiting on you, the browser tab says so — so a hand doesn't sit for ten minutes because somebody switched to their email. Nothing to grant permission for and nothing stored about anybody; it's just the tab's own name.
• The Friends button is gone. It promised online status and invitations, which needs an account for everybody who plays — and no sign-in is a promise this app intends to keep. What's coming instead is a saved table you can walk back into from the home screen, which is the part anybody actually wanted.

1.40.02026-08-13

Hosting a table starts where every other game starts.

• Online play sends you to the setup screen now, for 42 or for Fives, instead of opening a table straight from the menu. The house rules are part of the invitation, and skipping the one screen where a host says what they're playing meant a table went out with whatever rules happened to be loaded. The last button on that screen is what opens it to other people.
• Joining with a code stays where it was, because a code isn't a game you're setting up — it's somebody else's table you're walking into.

1.39.02026-08-13

Everything on the table reads from the chair you're actually sitting in.

• Your marks were being credited to "the other side". If you sat in an odd-numbered chair, the end-of-hand card told you your own team's marks had gone to the opposition. The marks themselves were always right — the sentence about them wasn't.
• The host was labelled "You" on everybody else's screen, and their real name never appeared in the running order across the top.
• The other side is named. "Buck & Darlene take it" was true when the other side was always the same two bots; at a table with your own people it's two strangers' names now, in both 42 and Fives.
• The profile button says My Profile. Sitting in a row with Friends and Support, a button labelled with your own name read as another player rather than as your settings.
• Chat off means off for the host too. It used to silence everybody else and leave whoever pressed it still talking, which isn't keeping order — it's a megaphone. If they want to say something they turn it back on, and everybody can see them do it.

1.38.02026-08-13

Table talk moves to the corner it belongs in.

• The conversation is in the bottom-right corner now — what's been said, the six quick phrases, and a box to type in, all of it in one place. It was a button at the top of the screen that opened a drawer over the table: one tap and one modal in front of saying a sentence, sitting where nothing else on that screen sits. The lobby puts chat in the bottom right, so that is where people already look for it. The button stays only on screens too narrow to have that corner.

1.37.12026-08-13

Tapping a Fives invitation opens a Fives table.

• A Fives invitation dropped you on the house-rules screen instead of the table. It opened the lobby correctly and then, a moment later, threw you out of it.

1.37.02026-08-13

Fives plays together too, and the shake goes back to the host.

• Fives can be played online. It could be shared and joined but not started — the shake refused anything but 42. Four people on four phones now play a hand of Fives the same way they play a hand of 42.
• The host calls the shake again. The "say when" interlock is gone. It needed the relay and the app updated in step, so anybody a version behind got a button that did nothing — and even working, it put four taps in front of a decision one person had already made. A host looking at three names in three chairs doesn't need the app to take a register.
• Between hands still tells you who it's waiting on, because there it answers a different question — not "may we start" but "is the table waiting on me" — and it's only ever shown, never enforced.

1.36.02026-08-13

Reads properly on a phone, and the table tells you who it's waiting on between hands.

• Names stopped piling up on a phone. On a narrow screen the two side seats were being asked to fit a face, a two-word name and two badges on one line in about 90px — so the name wrapped under the face, SHAKER and DOWN landed on each other, and the turn token sat across the lot. They stack now, and the east seat stays on the screen instead of growing off the edge.
• "Trick 4 of 7" is readable. It answers the one question you keep asking mid-hand — how much of this is left — and it was the smallest, dimmest thing on the table.
• Between hands, the table says who it's waiting on. Same interlock as the first shake, for the same reason: somebody is always still looking at what just happened when the next hand lands on them.
• Nobody is called "You" any more. It's the word the app uses for whoever's holding the phone, so a chair labelled with it read as three different people all called You. Reported from a real table, where the host showed up that way to everybody else.
• Table talk is readable in The Hall. That room's accent is a deep navy — right against its pale tabletop, invisible on the dark chat panel.

1.35.02026-08-13

Everybody says when they're ready, a Fives table is a Fives table, and you can get back to your chair.

• Sharing a Fives table shared a 42 table. Whichever game you opened, everybody who joined landed in 42. The game belongs to the table now, set by whoever opened it, and it's named at the top of the lobby so there's no guessing.
• Everybody says when they're ready. The shake was the host's alone, which meant it could land while somebody was still sorting their bones. Each person says they're set, the shake waits until all of them have, and the host's screen says whose bones everyone's waiting on.
• You can get back to your chair. If your phone locks or you hit Leave by mistake mid-hand, your chair is held and you come straight back to it. It wasn't — a started table refused everybody, and a deliberate leave gave the chair away, so between them there was no way home. Reported from a real table.
• A table can be dealt again. It used to shake exactly once, so a table that went wrong was dead and the only way on was a new code and four people re-joining.
• Typing no longer gets wiped when somebody else sends a message. Half a sentence, or half your name, vanished every time anybody pressed Enter.

1.34.02026-08-13

Talk at the table, everybody in the same room, and the draw for the shake is back.

• Table talk carries on into the game. Chat used to stop at the shake, which is backwards — the lobby is people waiting and the table is people playing, and the talking is most of why you'd rather play with your own crowd than with strangers. On a wide screen the last few lines sit in the corner that has been reserved for them since before there was anything to put there; on a phone it's a Talk button that marks itself when somebody's said something.
• The draw for the first shake happens online too. It was being dealt straight past — and it's the one moment where all four of you watch the same thing happen at the same time, which is the whole point of doing it out loud.
• Everybody plays in the host's room, however they got in. It rode on the invitation link for one release, so anybody who typed the code in sat on their own felt instead. It belongs to the table now.
• Your face and your bone backs are changeable from the table. They were only reachable from your profile, which meant walking out of somebody's game to change them and hoping your chair was still there when you got back.
• The hand you just played scrolls. On a wide screen a long hand was quietly cut off at the bottom with no way to reach the rest.

1.33.02026-08-13

The join code says what it is, the room travels with the invitation, and nobody turns up called "You".

• The four words are labelled. They read as decoration with nothing above them, and people were asking what they were for. It says Table join code now, and what to do with it.
• Your people arrive in your room. Tap a host's link and you land on their felt — The Hall, Northgate, the slate, whichever they picked. At a real table everybody is in the same room; you don't each see your own.
• Nobody shows up as "You". It's the word the app uses for you, so on three other screens it was a chair labelled with somebody else's pronoun. Anyone who hasn't set a name is asked once, plainly, and shows as Player until they do.
• A table that has already been shaken says so. It used to sit on "Dealing" forever with nothing happening — the worst kind of broken, because it looks like it's working. It now says the table has started and offers to open a fresh one.
• Names are capped at 20 characters, in the profile as well as at the table.

1.32.02026-08-13

Four people, one hand. Shake 'em actually shakes.

• You can play a real game with your own people now. Open a table, send the four words, everybody picks a chair, and the host calls the shake — and all four of you are in the same hand, on your own phones, in your own chairs.
• Nobody's bones cross the wire. The relay sends one shared shake and nothing else about the deal. Every device deals the same 28 bones from it on its own, so there is no server holding anybody's hand and none to leak.
• Empty chairs are played by the bots on the host's device, and relayed like any other move — so all four of you see the same bot make the same play, instead of four devices each inventing a different one.
• Walking out of an online table hangs up properly, instead of leaving your chair held against three people waiting on you.

1.31.02026-08-13

Checking a change takes seconds instead of ten minutes, and the lobby does what you'd expect when you're hosting.

• Change your name at the table. It used to be set once in your profile, before there was anybody to see it — and the moment you walk into somebody else's table is exactly when you notice it still says "You". It's on the lobby screen now, and changing it doesn't cost you your chair.
• The host's chair stays put. Everybody's screen is drawn from the host's seat, so the host moving was the one thing that spun the table for everyone. It's fixed where you opened it.
• Shake 'em appears when the table's actually ready — four people in chairs, or you've filled the rest with bots — and says what's still missing until then.
• A late arrival can take a bot's chair. They were always free; now the chair says so instead of leaving you to guess whether a robot can be moved.

1.30.02026-08-12

The lobby stops moving under your finger, the table is round again, and passing the phone gets out of the way.

• The table no longer rotates when you sit down. The host is at the near edge of the table for everybody now, and stays there. It used to draw the table from the host until you picked a chair and then swing round to face you — so the moment you chose, the whole thing turned and the host jumped to the far side. You cannot choose where to sit relative to somebody who moves when you choose. One fixed point, the same picture on all four screens, which also makes "take the chair on my left" a thing people can say out loud.
• The table is round. It was a circle on a phone and a clear oval on a laptop.
• Leaving a table frees your chair. Walking out used to look exactly like walking into a dead spot, so the people left behind sat waiting on somebody who had gone home. The app says goodbye out loud now.
• Passing one phone round the table folds away. It is a real way to play and a minority one, and it had the top of the house-rules screen — a row of buttons and a paragraph that everybody setting up an ordinary game had to read past. It is one line now, and opens to exactly what it was. If you already play that way it opens itself.
• Chairs say what they are before you pick one. Standing up, they're described relative to the host — the seat across from them, the two against them. Once you're sitting, relative to you.

1.29.02026-08-12

Open a table your own people can join, and pick who you're playing with.

• Tables you can actually invite people to. Open one and you get four words. Send them to whoever you want in the other three chairs — they type the words in, or tap the link, and they're at your table. No sign-in, for them or for you, and nothing about anybody is kept: the table forgets itself a few hours after the last word is said.
• You choose your chair, not the app. Whoever opens the table is already sitting. Everybody after that walks in standing up and picks a seat — because at a 42 table the chair you take is the person you're playing with, and that isn't the app's decision to make. The lobby draws it from where you're sitting: your chair is the near one, your partner's is the one straight across.
• Somewhere to talk while you wait. The awkward part of a code table isn't the game, it's the wait — one person sat on a code with three empty chairs wondering whether anybody's coming. Chat is there from the first chair, not after the first shake.
• Fill the rest with bots when you'd rather not wait on a fourth. The host calls it and everybody stops waiting at the same moment.
• A signal that drops is a hiccup, not a lost seat. Walk through a dead spot and the table shows you as quiet rather than gone; come back and you're in the same chair. Nobody can take it while you're away.
• What your partner's throw-offs mean is now yours to set, in your profile beside AI difficulty, where it belongs — the other side of that convention is a bot, and a bot plays whatever you tell it. Straight by default. If you'd already picked Reverse or Off, you keep it.
• You can mute somebody, and the host can shut chat off. Tap a name in the table chat and you can stop hearing from them — it hides what they've already said as well as what they say next, it only affects your screen, they aren't told, and it lasts as long as the table. Muting sticks to the person, so moving chairs or dropping their signal doesn't get them heard again. If it's worse than that, whoever opened the table can turn chat off for everybody but themselves.
• Six things you can say without typing — Howdy, On my way, Two minutes, Ready when you are, Need a fourth, Good game. Most of the talking in a lobby is one of those, said with a phone in one hand.
• We plan to open-source the rules engines. 42 is a house game carried by people rather than a rulebook, and the honest way to get the logic right is to let the people who play it read it and send us the correction. Said properly in How it works.

1.28.02026-08-10

Sit down with however many turned up, Moon catches up with the other tables, and the pips are round.

• A table fills up with whoever is there. Say how many of you turned up — one, two, three or four — and the rest of the chairs get filled, with the difficulty picked right there. Two people sit as partners, because that's how two people sit.
• You see the third bone played in Moon. The engine sweeps the trick the moment it lands, and Moon froze the screen without repainting first — so the last thing you ever saw was the table after the second play. It holds the finished trick as long as the 42 table does now, too.
• Moon shows everyone's whole hand, face down and lying flat so the mark on the back reads, instead of four bones and a number beside them.
• Moon keeps a record of what's been played, in the same corner as 42, and lays the hand out big when it ends.
• Rules in Moon behaves. Tapping it mid-bid used to leave the bid panel stranded on top of the rule book, and Back dropped you on the front page. It returns to the table now, with whatever it was waiting on put back — and the table is still running when you get there.
• The pips are circles. At every size, on every table, including halfway through the Fives board zoom.
• Send this table works from Moon and Taroky too, and a table name now arrives labelled as one.

1.27.02026-08-10

Three opponents who play like three different people, and one who finally stops pulling trump that isn't there.

• The AI judges a hand the way a player does. It counts its losers as well as its winners, knows the ten-count lives in the fours, fives and sixes, and knows four trumps is worth far more than twice two. It bids much better for it — Standard makes 72% of what it bids now, up from 57%.
• It stops drawing trump when there's none left to draw. Reported from play, and dead right: it was leading winners into an empty table and losing the count it was protecting.
• The three settings are three different players now, not one turned up and down. Easy is somebody who learned it last Thanksgiving — leads its biggest bone because big feels safe, throws count away when it can't win. Standard is the regular at a weekly game. Sharp is the one who plays in tournaments: fights for bids, remembers who bid what and still uses it in the seventh trick, and signals to its partner.
• Your partner can indicate. A new house rule under My go-to rules — Texas 42: straight, reverse, or off. A Sharp partner tells you which suits it holds doubles in by which bone it throws away, and reads yours the same way.
• Your go-to rules now actually reach the next table. Change one and deal, and you were playing the rules you had when you opened the app — set the game to three marks and you were still playing to seven.
• The flag on the table mark stopped leaking. Its hatching ran off the tile on the Fives and Moon tables.

1.26.02026-08-10

The new seal is on the table — pressed into three of them, hung on the wall of the fourth.

• The mark on the felt is Mark B.4, the seal. Oak on one side, olive on the other, the name round the rim and the flag domino in the middle.
• On the green table, at Northgate and on the slate it's the line-art cut, in one colour — the same single-colour drawing the brand system uses for embroidery and engraving, which is what a mark pressed into a tabletop is. Each room says what the ink is: lighter than the felt on the green table, a cut in the wood at Northgate, chalk dust on the slate.
• The Hall gets the seal in its own red and navy, hung faint. A sign on a hall wall isn't pretending to be part of the table, so it doesn't act like it.

1.25.02026-08-10

Corners lie flat, everyone's bones are on the Fives table, and the hand you just played is big enough to read.

• The line turns a proper corner. Where the formation bends, the two long edges now run into each other dead straight. The turning bone used to stay centred on the old run and hang half its width past the end of the line, which left a step in the outside of every corner.
• You can see how many bones everybody's holding in Fives, face down, with the backs you picked — the same as on the 42 table. They overlap, because three hands of seven across one row is more than the row has.
• The brass token is on the Fives table too. It sits beside whoever's turn it is and travels between seats.
• The hand you just played fills the side of the table when the hand ends. Same record as the corner box, drawn big enough to actually read, next to the score panel instead of underneath it.
• The corner record shows that it scrolls. It always did; the scrollbar had been switched off to keep the box tidy, which quietly hid four of the seven tricks.
• The three preset buttons say what they are — Quick start — rules presets — and the note under them starts by saying they're starting points.
• The Moon signpost is off the 42 setup screen. If you've picked 42 you've already seen Moon on the front page, and that screen is the one everybody gets through before every game.
• Moon deals with "Shake 'em!" and Taroky with "Deal 'em!"
• Send this table now says who's hosting, alongside the table name and the house rules — and the line explaining it no longer runs two different things into one sentence.

1.24.02026-08-10

Fives is laid out like 42 now, the board comes to meet you, and the way back off a page says "Back" again.

• The Fives table has the same dock as 42. The strip that says the score, your bones, and the pad they're written on all sit in one column in the middle, with table talk reserved on the right. They'd been spread across the three columns — which is why the US/THEM pad was jammed into the right-hand corner with most of it hanging off the edge of the screen.
• The board zooms. The first bone of a hand is drawn big on an empty table, and the whole formation eases back as it spreads out. It could only ever shrink before, so early play sat tiny in the middle of an acre of felt.
• The badge on the Fives felt is the size it is on the 42 felt. It had been measuring itself against the whole window rather than the table, and ran down through the dock at twice the size.
• Moon got both of those fixes too, because it had both of the same faults from the same copy.
• The way back off a page is legible again. Privacy, the Pledge, What's new, How to play, Vocabulary and the not-found page all ended with a gold button with nothing written on it, on every table but the green one.
• Every page outside the game now sits on the Club's tabletop rather than its own flatter green, so leaving the table doesn't feel like leaving the site.
• The domino backs are laid out on purpose. Ten squares, five across, two rows, and the same two rows whether or not you've added a photo of your own — the empty corner says so instead of the grid reshuffling the moment you fill it. The two stars share a column, the two flags share a column, and the rose and the cannon sit together.
• Two backs are called what they're called. Stars & Stripes is Old Glory; Come and Take It is the Battle of Gonzales.
• "How to play" appears once on the home screen, not twice.

1.23.02026-08-09

Every room gets its own version of the badge, and the game names hold still when you change tables.

• The badge on the felt is drawn differently in each room. On the green table and at Northgate it's line art now — the outline, the two lines that divide a Texas flag, and the star, with nothing in it heavier than the name round the rim. The slate keeps the shaded one, which is the version that reads like chalk dust on stone. And the Hall gets the actual logo, in navy and red, hung faint behind the play: a sign on a hall wall isn't pretending to be part of the table, so it doesn't act like it.
• The game names stay put when you switch tables. Every room had drifted to its own padding and border, so the names nudged up and down by a few pixels each time you tried a different one — the sort of thing you feel before you can name it.
• You can see whose turn it is in the Hall. A pale gold wash on a bright speckled tabletop was nearly invisible; it's the hall's own dark red now.

1.20.02026-08-09

Pick your table from a row that says so, and the flag on the felt reads like a flag.

• "Choose your table:" sits beside the row of four, and the pair is centred together. The old Theme button is gone — the tables are on the screen now, so a button that opens a picker for them was a second way to do the same thing.
• The lit block slides from where it was to where you sent it instead of jumping. It was being thrown away and rebuilt every time the table changed, and a brand new thing has nothing to travel from.
• Each room colours its own picker. The Hall was the worst of it — pale type on a dark wash, on a bright speckled tabletop. It gets dark ink on white now, with the highlight in the hall's own red.
• The cards are the same height on every table, so the picker under them doesn't step up and down as you try the rooms.
• The badge on the felt reads as the Texas flag. Half again as big, with the three fields in three shades of the room's own colour.
• Played tricks are half the size and the bottom band no longer grows as they pile up. It was getting 130 pixels taller by the seventh trick, and every one of those came out of the table.

1.19.02026-08-09

Pick your table from the front page, and a finished trick shows you the count at a glance.

• The four tables are on the home screen now, in a row with the one you're using lit. Tap another and the light slides across — no button, no pop-up, and you can see what else there is without opening anything. Hover any of them for a line about the room.
• A finished trick tells you where the count went. A plain bone stands upright, a count bone lies flat, and two counts lie one on top of the other in the space one upright takes — so a row with two counts in it is the same width as a row with none. Three counts go two stacked and the last one hanging off the bottom, which is roughly what it looks like on a real table. There's room between the bones now, too.
• The badge on the felt is the new Mark B, and it sits square in the middle of the open table — it had been tucked up under your partner's bones with all the space underneath.
• Setting up a table is a shorter screen. The list of who's sitting where went, since the table tells you that ten seconds later, and the two boxes worth keeping say the same thing in less room.
• "Shake 'em!" wherever the app used to say "Shake 'em up." It's the slogan; it belongs on the button.

1.18.02026-08-09

Won tricks moved off the table, the room stays with you at the table, and the mark on the felt is the real one.

• The bottom of the screen is three panels now: what's been played on the left, you and your bones in the middle, table talk on the right. The record used to float over the green in the corner of the table, which meant it was always sitting on somebody's bones. The felt is where the game happens; the dark band underneath is where the record of it belongs.
• The room doesn't disappear when you sit down. The names carved into the Northgate rail and the notes on the slate stay with you at the table now — only the furniture goes, because there's a game on the table. On Northgate the Texas Bones badge is cut into the wood along with everything else.
• The mark on the felt is the real Mark B, taken straight from the brand file rather than drawn from memory — same disc, same bone, same star.
• The slate reads like a slate. The notes on it run at every angle from about 45 degrees one way to 45 the other instead of all lying flat, and they're a quarter rubbed off rather than three quarters, so you can very nearly read them. The phone number is still gone.
• The Bonus star on Taroky is white on Northgate and in the Hall, where the dark lettering was disappearing into the gold, and it's in the top right corner on every table — in the Hall it had been landing 150 pixels short of it.
• The Back button at the bottom of Profile works. It had never worked; the one at the top always had.

1.17.02026-08-09

Name your table, send it to your people, and the mark is on the felt.

• Give your table a name. The Thursday game, Grandma's table, the deer lease — whatever you call it. It sticks with your go-to rules and sits across the top of the table while you play. A real table has a name; an app that only ever says "Texas 42" is a game you launched rather than a table you keep.
• Send this table. One tap writes out what you're playing — "The Thursday Game. Texas 42, four of us, partners across. Game to 7 marks, 30 to open. Straight 42." — and hands it to your phone's share sheet. What goes out is an invitation to a table, not a link to an app.
• Only three turned up? The three-handed answer now sits where the problem is actually felt: on the setup screen for 42 and Fives, and near the top of the rule book. Moon isn't a consolation for a short table, it's the game for exactly that table.
• The mark is on the table. Texas Bones sits on the felt the way a hall's name sits on its own — big enough to be the table's, quiet enough that you stop seeing it. On Northgate it's cut into the wood.

1.16.12026-08-09

One more place the table could shift.

• When your partner across the table picked up the SHAKER or BID badge, his name plate grew a line and both side players slid down the table with it. Everything is pinned now.

1.16.02026-08-09

The table holds still now, the Northgate carvings are our own, and each game teaches only its own words.

• The table stopped twitching. Every bone played used to move four other things — a seat re-centred, the played-tricks box grew and wandered into somebody's bones, the whole felt stepped up and down as the commentary changed length. Everything now has its own space and keeps it. A brass marker slides between seats so you can watch the turn move instead of noticing afterwards that it did.
• A bone leaves your hand the moment you play it. It used to sit in your hand and on the table at the same time for about two seconds whenever your play finished a trick.
• Played tricks live in the bottom-left corner, at twice the size, in a box that never changes shape. The right-hand corner is held for chat, so the two corners will be a pair.
• Bigger bones on a laptop — about a quarter larger in your hand and in the middle of the table. A phone is held at arm's length; a laptop has people sitting round it.
• Your name, the scores and the bid sit on one line above your bones, instead of at opposite ends of the bar.
• The Northgate carvings are our own now. The borrowed ones came off — school slogans belong to the school, and this app has a tip jar in it. In their place, things people actually say to each other, and the class years stay. So does Shake 'em!
• The Hall got its props back at a size you can see — the cups, the fish plate and the fish-fry flyer are twice what they were, and the flyer is taped up on the wall rather than lying in the corner.
• The slate has more than a score on it now: some Chem 101 working, Mass at St Mary's at 0845, and a note to call Sandra back with the number half wiped off.
• Each game teaches only its own words. The list is called Vocabulary, and 42 no longer explains what a spinner is while Fives explains what a Plunge is. Words that belong to more than one game appear in all of them. Table talk is in there now, since it's the term you're meant to know in order not to do it.
• The 42% Pledge reads better and stays on your table — it used to drop you onto a green page whatever room you were sitting in. Fresh wording, the promise unchanged: 42% of net proceeds, back to the game.
• Off had the wrong definition — it's a bone that isn't trump, not a bone with no count on it. Boss is gone; within a suit we just say the double is the highest. And we spell it Nello now, which is where the published rules land.
• The tab icon's flag nearly fills the square, so it reads at 16 pixels instead of being a smudge.

1.15.02026-08-09

You can play the whole game with a keyboard now, the Tournament rules are right, and each game teaches its own words.

• You can play without a mouse. Tab to your hand, arrow keys along it, Enter to play. Every bone says what it is out loud too — "six five, ten count" — so a screen reader gives you your hand instead of seven silent shapes. This was the one place the app stopped somebody at the door, and it's open now.
• The Tournament preset was wrong in three ways, and reading the actual rules found all three. There was no three-mark bid at all — bidding went one mark, two marks, then four — so a table wanting three had to bid four. Sanctioned play lets you open at two marks; we capped the opening at one. And the first shake is drawn for, not assigned, so now it is: four bones face up, highest takes it, ties draw again.
• Each game teaches only its own words. The word list is called Vocabulary, and 42 no longer explains what a spinner is while Fives explains what a Plunge is. Neither word exists in the other game. Table talk joins the list, since it is the one term you are meant to know in order not to do it.
• Nello tricks stack in twos, the way they go down at a real table, so you count piles instead of rows. The last trick stays face up on top.
• We spell it Nello now. Texas spells it a dozen ways; that is the one the published rules use.
• "Off" had the wrong definition — it is a bone that isn't trump, not a bone with no count on it. And Boss is gone; it isn't a word anybody at a Texas table actually says.

1.14.02026-08-08

Easier to use without a mouse, easier to install, and it respects your phone's settings.

• You can see where you are. The focus ring was a hairline in near-black — invisible on a green table. It's a thick gold ring now, and it only shows when you're navigating by keyboard, not when you click.
• Panels behave like panels. Escape closes them, focus goes into them when they open and back where it came from when they close, and it stays inside while they're open. The one exception is the pass-the-phone screen, which stays put on purpose — dismissing that would hand the phone over with the last player's bones still showing.
• If you've asked your phone to reduce motion, it now listens. Everything still works; it just stops sliding and fading.
• Buttons are all big enough to hit, and what the app says out loud — "Buck bids 30" — is now announced properly rather than only drawn.
• Installing is nicer. The install prompt shows real screenshots of the game, and holding the app icon gives you shortcuts straight into 42, Fives or Moon.

1.13.02026-08-08

Moon gets a proper chapter, and What's new is written for players.

• Moon has a full rule book chapter now — why it exists, the twenty-two bones, the widow and what to bury, bidding in tricks, and a section on playing it well. It sits alongside 42, Fives and Taroky in How to play.
• What's new is shorter and in plain language. It used to list every change including the ones only a developer could care about. Now it says what you'd actually notice.

1.12.02026-08-08

Your own photo on the back of your bones, and Fives passes the phone.

• Put your own picture on your domino backs. A photo of your own set, your dog, whatever you like — pick it in Profile and it becomes the back of every bone you hold. Only you ever see your own backs.
• Pass-and-play now works in Fives too, the same way it does in 42: one phone round a real table, and the screen goes blank between turns so nobody sees anybody else's bones.
• The rule book and Table talk are now proper pages you can link to and share, not just screens inside the app.

1.11.02026-08-08

Moon — the three-handed game, for the night only three people turn up.

• Moon — the game for the night only three of you make it. Twenty-two bones, seven each and one lying face down in the middle. Win the bid and that one comes into your hand; then you bury something and lead.
• You bid in tricks here, not points — four, five, six, seven, or moon for the lot. Bring it home and the number is yours; fall short and it comes straight off. Everyone else picks up a point for each trick they took. First to 21, and nobody has a partner.
• Naming blanks as trump is legal and leaves you exactly one trump. It is a bluff, not a plan.

1.10.02026-08-08

Pass-and-play: four people, one phone, and no signal needed.

• One phone in the middle of a real table, passed round. No account, no server, no connection — it works in a hall with no bars on your phone, and it works when not everybody at the table carries one.
• The screen goes blank between turns, and waits for the next player to say they're holding it. That's the whole trick to four hands on one phone.
• The table turns round to whoever has it: your bones at the bottom, your partner across, Us meaning your side of the score.

1.9.02026-08-08

A proper glossary, the story of 42, and a page that shows what's new.

• Table talk is a real glossary now — twenty-six terms, written the way somebody at a table would say them. Bones, shake, count, mark, set, boss, walker, sluff, spinner, knock, Domino!
• The story of 42 is on the 42% Pledge page. Two boys in trouble for playing cards — William Thomas, twelve, and Walter Earl, fourteen — at Trapp Spring in Parker County in 1887. Card playing was forbidden and dominoes weren't.
• Fixed: opening the rules card mid-bid could leave the table stuck.

1.8.02026-08-08

Big print arrives, and every table tells you what it's playing.

• Big print, in Profile. Bigger bones, bigger type, stronger contrast, buttons you can actually hit — and nothing faded out, since a hint you can't make out is worse than none at all.
• *Tap Rules at any table* and it tells you exactly what this table is playing. Handy three hands in, when somebody asks.
• The rules are settled when the bones are shaken and stay that way for the game. Want different ones? Start a new table.
• The house-rules agreement round is gone. Whoever's table it is sets the rules — the way it works when you're the one hosting.

1.7.02026-08-08

Nel-O: you call how the doubles run, every hand.

• When you bid Nel-O you now say how doubles behave — high, low, or a suit of their own — right before you lead, looking at your own bones. That's a real decision, not a setting.
• Your table decides which of the three are allowed; the bidder picks one of them each time. If your table only allows one, nothing changes and it never asks.
• Holding a double? Low is the safe call — it turns your doubles into the smallest bones on the table.

1.6.02026-08-08

Your settings now survive an update, whatever happens.

• Nobody signs in here, so your name, your table rules and your bone back live on your phone and nowhere else. There's now a proper guarantee that an update never costs you any of it.
• If something ever can't be saved — storage full, private browsing — the app says so once instead of quietly pretending.

1.5.72026-08-08

The AI levels described as players, and Nel-O defaults to doubles low.

• Easy, Standard and Sharp now say what kind of player they are rather than what setting they are. Easy is somebody's first few games; Standard plays every week; Sharp is the one who counts.
• The Block T is a Big T.

1.5.52026-08-07

Tidier settings, and a proper block letter.

• The Block T back is a real block letter now — the kind on a cap, with the crossbar tabs and the flared foot.
• Auto-play forced moves is gone; nobody wants the app playing for them. The scorepad toggles say what they do.

1.5.22026-08-07

New domino backs.

• The flags are printed across the back now — Texas, Stars & Stripes and Come and Take It fill the whole tile instead of sitting in a little rectangle in the middle.
• The Texas Bones mark is bigger, and the Longhorn is now Beef.

1.5.02026-08-07

The AI got a great deal better, and the app says exactly how.

• The difficulty levels didn't actually go up. They do now: Sharp beats Standard, Standard clearly beats Easy, and it's measured over thousands of whole games rather than asserted.
• The AI was bidding hands it couldn't make. It bids tight now, and brings home about the share a good table does.
• Sharp counts. It knows exactly what's still out, so it knows the moment your partner's trick can't be caught — and that's when the ten goes on.
• What the AI is actually doing — a new part of How it works that lays out how it bids, walks the trumps, helps its partner and throws off, in the words a player would use. It also says plainly what it still can't do.
• Rule presets are Learning, Tournament and Your Table. Tournament links to the National 42 Players Association so you can check our rules against theirs.
• The Standard table is The Club.

1.4.02026-08-07

Splash, Plunge and Sevens — the special contracts.

• Splash (three doubles) and Plunge (four doubles). Your partner names the trumps seeing only their own hand, and between you it's all seven tricks or you're set.
• Sevens. No trumps at all — everyone plays the bone closest to seven pips, closest takes the trick, and the bidding side needs every one.
• The AI bids all four contracts now, including Nel-O, which it never used to. It calls Splash and Plunge rarely, because they're a gamble by design.
• Tournament is straight 42: sanctioned play allows none of these, which surprises people, so the screen says so.

1.3.12026-08-07

The app icon and link previews come from the brand.

• The icon on your home screen is the flag domino from the brand, and a link you text to family now shows the wordmark rather than a squashed icon.

1.3.02026-08-07

The official marks go in, and two tables get rebuilt.

• The real wordmark heads every page and every table, recoloured to match whichever table you're at — except the Texas flag, which keeps its own colours, because a Texas flag that changed colour with the tablecloth wouldn't be one.
• KC Hall is now The Hall. The baskets are rebuilt with checked deli paper inside them, which is exactly why anybody serving food in a basket lays paper in first.
• Slate is a real stone now, and the chalk is dusty and granular — with an old score half rubbed out by somebody's sleeve.
• New backs: the Come and Take It cannon is solid black, and the boots became a Longhorn.

1.2.02026-08-07

Every version is kept, and publishing is one command.

• Every released version is now archived exactly as it went out, so any of them can be put back on the web.

1.1.02026-08-07

Taroky joins the table, and the game cards take after the room.

• Taroky joins the home screen as a bonus — the Czech card game, playable as a draft. Four of you sit down, whoever deals sits the hand out, and the other three play a 54-card tarot pack.
• Call your bonuses before the first trick — Trull, Kings, Valát, and the Pagát ultimo, which is taking the very last trick with the smallest trump in the pack.
• Game cards take after the room. The Hall serves them in red baskets, Northgate on stainless trays, The Club on tooled leather.

1.0.02026-08-07

First public release. Texas 42 and Fives, free, no ads, nothing for sale.

• Texas 42 with the full rules — bidding from 30 to 42, marks, trumps including doubles and follow-me, strict follow-suit, and Nel-O with the high, low and own-suit double conventions.
• Fives, end to end, with the spinner, four arms, doubles counting both halves, and scoring on multiples of five — partners or cutthroat.
• House rules are proposed and agreed before the first shake. Anyone at the table can object and counteroffer; a game never starts on unagreed rules.
• Three AI difficulties, all free. Sharp counts what's been played and works out what's still out — the same deduction you'd do yourself.
• A trick record in the corner of the table showing every trick taken, with the count dominoes turned sideways the way you'd stack them for real. On a phone it's a chip you tap.
• A rule book that teaches both games from zero, plus a Taroky entry for the Czech card game — written up, not playable.
• Four table themes: felt and brass, Northgate, KC Hall, and slate and chalk. Nine domino backs. All free, always.
• How it works — an account of the shuffle, the AI's information isolation, and what gets tested, with the numbers from the audits.
• Installs to your home screen and plays with no signal once it's loaded. No account, no sign-in, no tracking.