Made the daily puzzle easier to scan by starting in text-only mode, trimming the intro popup, enlarging the action buttons, and moving reminder prompts out of the main flow.
Puzzle item details now keep their own stable ID and link, so cover art, links, and stats stay attached to the right item even if a title changes later. Older puzzles were moved to the new format too.
When you use the color buttons to group tiles, the board now rearranges itself so each color group sits together at the start of a row. Hitting Shuffle does the same thing. A bug was also fixed where selecting a mix of uncolored tiles and already-colored tiles could push a color group over four tiles.
Improved page load speed: cover art now appears immediately instead of popping in after the board loads, which also fixes a layout jump on arrival. Game controls and color-mark buttons are larger on mobile for easier tapping. Several security improvements were made under the hood. You can now mark tiles with one of four colors while you think through the puzzle. Select any tiles, then use the small color dots above the board to tag them as a candidate group. Each color holds up to four tiles, and a dot disappears once its color is full. Marks are for planning only and have no effect on your score or streak. Two hint types are now available during play: Category Hint reveals the name of a random unsolved category, and Pair Hint highlights two items from the same group. Both cost one life and are only available while you have at least two lives remaining. After finishing a puzzle, you can rate it using the star prompt on the result screen. Archive puzzles now include a Challenge a Friend button that copies a link your friend can open to replay the same puzzle fresh. Once they finish, they see a side-by-side comparison of both results.
Each game tile now shows the cover art for its film or game. A toggle button above the board lets you switch between cover view and text-only view at any time, and the preference is remembered across visits. Text is larger in text-only mode for easier reading.
The archive is now much easier to use on mobile. Picking a puzzle from the list takes you straight to the game board, with a back button to return to the list. No more scrolling past the entire puzzle list to find the game.
Puzzles can now include a short dedication note above the board, which makes tribute editions and other one-off shout-outs easier to publish without turning them into full weekly themes.
You can now opt in to daily browser push notifications and get a reminder when the puzzle drops each morning at 8 AM your local time. Look for the bell icon at the bottom of the page. No account needed, and you can turn it off any time. Also added quick-access links directly in the puzzle header: Past Puzzles (on the daily puzzle page only), a link to the sister site, and a Get Daily Reminders shortcut for anyone not yet signed up for notifications.
Switched to server-side rendering across the whole site, so content is now generated fresh on each visit instead of being baked in at build time. The experience looks the same, but it opens up things that weren't possible with the old approach. Also corrected a logo sizing inconsistency that made the header appear smaller on pages like the blog, changelog, and how-to-play than it does on the main puzzle page.
Fixed a SEO issue where individual puzzle and blog post pages were not being indexed by Google. The canonical URL tags on those pages were missing a trailing slash, causing redirect errors that prevented indexing. Added canonical URL tags to all remaining pages (home, archive, blog, changelog, how-to-play, nominate, press) to prevent duplicate content signals from query-string variants. Also gave each of those pages a descriptive title that better reflects its content and targets relevant search terms.
The footer now stays anchored to the bottom of the screen on short pages instead of getting pushed out of view.
Improved the daily X post wording so the link text now invites people to play the puzzle instead of only showing the puzzle number and simplified the post hooks so they read more cleanly across both sites.
Updated site logo images to use PNG format for better quality and consistency. Added a consistent footer across all pages with navigation links, social links, and a cross-site promo. Saved progress now survives category wording edits, so published puzzle cleanups no longer break prior solves.
Fixed contrast issues sitewide to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards, improved overall performance, added Schema.org structured data for better search engine understanding, and added a notification when the same guess is submitted twice.
Added brand-specific favicon sets for each site, switched to self-hosted fonts for faster load times, and refined the hint system so it disables itself when only one mistake remains.
Redesigned the share image card with a cleaner two-column grid layout.
Corrected several puzzle data errors including bad IMDb links on CineLinkr and refreshed category variety on PixelLinkr.
Added canonical URLs across puzzle and blog pages and introduced writing style guidelines.
Added clickable item links inside solved groups so players can learn more after finishing. Improved analytics event tracking, hardened the puzzle authoring pipeline, and added per-puzzle OG image generation.
Added Twitter/X sharing: a share button in the results screen, an automated social post workflow wired to both brands, and a redesigned share card with a purple-grid background.
Added dark mode, first-visit onboarding, streak calendar, Share Streak button, a trivia card with expand/collapse in results, a hint system, a press page, OG metadata, a sitemap, and puzzle recap pages for SEO.
Major architecture day: launched multi-brand support so CineLinkr and PixelLinkr run as separate sites from one shared codebase. Also shipped archive/replay for past puzzles, versioned localStorage, a full CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Pages deployment, accessibility improvements, tile animations, and spoiler warnings.
Initial launch. Core gameplay with daily puzzle rotation, seeded shuffle for a consistent board, solved group rationale display, analytics, and the How to Play page.