The big news for the morning is that we've got Blackberry Game on the site now.  This game is very similar to Telephone Game, but it is much simpler, because there are only two letters per blackberry key (and some keys only have one letter!).

For this reason, many of our teen and adult members much prefer the greater challenge of Telephone Game, but younger children find Blackberry Game to be more at their difficulty level.

Give Blackberry Game a try here.

A few small tweaks this morning.

1. The game board has been rearranged for Picture Word and Hangman, so the alphabet is at the bottom of the game board, like it is for Secret Word.  This is to maintain consistency, and to (hopefully) make game play easier for mobile users.
2. Last Candle was given a very minor tweak to help keep the size of the candles consistent, so you don't sometimes have huge candles, and other times really small candles.
3. If you bookmark theproblemsite.net, you shouldn't have to keep going back to the DevTester page on the old site to renew your access.  The only time you'll need to go back there is if you stay away for more than 7 days, or I have a specific user account update that needs to be transferred over to your account on the new site.

I'd like to direct your attention to two new things on the site:

1.  We've uploaded video instructions for playing Adders.   Probably this was not the game most in need of video directions, but it's the first one we tried.  Creating video directions for the different games is going to be a long-range goal for the site.  You can view the video by clicking the video camera icon on the adders page.  It looks like this:

2.  A Discussion Forum has been added to the site.  The forum software is not 100% complete; for example, you can't yet format text in your posts, or add links.  Those features will appear down the road.  Right now, I wanted to make sure testers have a place where they can go to post comments and suggestions, or even just chat with other testers.

Hangman was the very first game built on The Problem Site!  It has remained largely unchanged since the beginning.  The graphical interface was slightly tweaked a couple years ago, but this is a brand new hangman!

The dictionary (over 127 thousand words!) is the same, but this hangman game is animated.  Don't worry, it's no more gruesome and macabre than the old version.  The new version has an animation of a pencil drawing the gallows and person.

For now I have left out the option to choose whether you are allowed 9, 10, 11, or 12 guesses; that option never seemed to get a lot of use anyway; I think most people felt that 9 was a reasonable number of guesses to make an interesting, but not too challenging game.

If you have an old browser, the animation will not show. Instead, you should see the same old image from the old version of the site.

Give our Animated Hangman a try! 

You will notice that some games (including Adders and Trio Match, which were both originally designed for keyboard play) now have a setup option labeled "Touch Controls".  These are controls for people who would rather use touch (or a mouse, on desktop machines) than the keyboard.

One of the options for "Touch Controls" is "Auto."  Setting the option to "Auto" results in the computer trying to guess, based on your browser size, whether you're using a desktop or mobile device, and setting the option automatically for you.  If the "Auto" option doesn't do what you want, you can select "Show" or "Hide" to tell the site NOT to auto-detect your preference.  You can also save your settings, so the computer will remember your preference.

Please note that settings are saved per user account, NOT per device, so if you swap between devices, and have different preferences based on your device, you'll need to reset the options each time you switch devices.  In that case, it's probably easier to just go with "Auto".

We're trying something different with Word Funnel.  It's not reasonable to do a high score list based on a single play of the game, since everyone gets a different board, and some boards are much harder than others.  So we've created a 'multi-level' mode of play for the game, which allows for high score lists.

In multi-level mode, each "game" is really just a single level of a larger game.  When you finish a level (either because you submit the last word, or because you ran out of time), if you have at least four out of six valid words, your move on to the next level.  In each successive level, you have five seconds less to complete the words.  Thus, on level 2, you have 55 seconds, on level 3, 50 seconds, etc.

If you don't have at least four valid words, your game is over.

Your game score, then, is the sum of all your level scores, and that's the number which appears in the high score lists.

Don't like the pressure of multi-level mode?  That's okay!  You can choose to disable it in your game options!