Three new things to play in three different places, and a game that grows a town. Your daily puzzles, your streak and your backyard are exactly as you left them.
The Shore, a new door
- Walk down from the backyard to the water: a beach with a pier, gulls, weather, and the cottage small on the hill behind you. This is where the score games live, and they never touch your daily streak, your history or your progress.
- The beach grows the way the backyard does. Every floor you land in Skyline counts for life, and from ten floors to eight hundred it earns thirty-five things along the water and up on the hill, from a parasol and a sandcastle to a lighthouse, a ferry, a monkey in the palms and fireworks. They are listed in the Archive under the Shore's own name.
- Across the bay, on its own islet, stands your town.
Skyline, the Shore's score game
- A crane swings over the pier. Tap, click or press A to drop each piece square on the building below. A run is a row of lots: crates first, then containers, masonry storeys, and whole buildings that pick a form of their own, a tower, a house, an office or a lighthouse.
- Wind picks up from the third floor and carries a falling piece sideways; from the third lot the load swings on its cable. A windsock, a lean meter and a footprint on the building show exactly what the next drop will do.
- A building leans. Stack too far to one side and the floors above the overhang topple into the sea, and the people, cats and birds living in them bail out with parachutes. Three losses on one building end the run.
- Every building you finish joins your town. A Town screen lets you arrange it across eight lots, name by name, and fix a crooked building for acorns. Every run that finishes a building is kept as a city, the last sixty of them, and any city can be rebuilt onto the lots whole.
- Postcards: the town, a past city or the run you just played can be saved as a picture and copied to the clipboard. On Steam it lands in your screenshot library too.
- Today's harbour gives everyone the same run on the day's shared seed, with its own board. Free play keeps the weekly and all-time boards. Six achievements: Dockhand, Harbourmaster, Steady Hands, Topping Out, Harbour Town and Architect.
Checkmate, a sixteenth daily puzzle
- A chess position from a real game, every day: find the checkmate. Easy is mate in one, Medium in two, Hard in three.
- Tap a piece to see where it may go, then the square, or drag it there. A wrong move is refused and costs nothing but time; the right one is played, the other side answers on its own, and you play on until the king has nowhere left.
- Four years of puzzles, 1,500 at every difficulty, most of them from games played by titled players, and the board says so before the first move. Every position comes from the Lichess puzzle database and was verified twice on its way in.
- You have a rating. Every solve is a game against the puzzle's rating, a clean one a win, and it moves the way it does on the chess sites.
Buttons, a sixth game on the porch
- Turkish Dama on an 8x8 board. Buttons move one square forward or sideways and jump the other side's buttons to capture them. Capturing is compulsory, one jump can lead into the next, and when you have a choice you must take the line that captures the most.
- A button that reaches the far row becomes a brooch, even in the middle of a chain, and a brooch moves and captures like a rook.
- A Gentle computer opponent a child can beat, a Sharp one that will not be beaten easily, a head start for seat one, undo for a whole chain, and matches you can put down and pick up later.
The Trading Post opens
- Points from Wheel's bonus words, finished boards and Shore runs convert to acorns, and acorns buy things: four Skyline paints, worn by every run's pieces from then on and kept by every building built in them, and repairs to the buildings in your town. Paints change nothing but the colours.
A quieter front page
- The backyard used to wear six buttons across the top. Two are left, the Shore and Play together, and the Archive, Challenges, Leaderboards and the Trading Post sit behind a More chip beside them, where the badge for a waiting challenge now lives.
Unchanged
- The fifteen dailies you already know, the backyard, the Archive, your streak and your rewards are exactly as you left them, and every board already played deals exactly as before.
- The demo shares this build. Checkmate, the Shore and Buttons are full-game only there.
If you spot anything in a puzzle that does not belong at a family table, tell us in the discussions. We would rather fix it the same day.
See you at the cottage, and down at the shore.