Tadpole Games

Tell us your child's school year, and the words follow it. Fredle, Tick or Fix and Sumdle used to ask you to pick a difficulty out of thin air. Now they take it from the school year you choose once, matched to your country's own curriculum, and the words, the board size and the sums all move with it. Nothing to guess at, and it keeps up as your child moves up. Spelling comes to three more games. In Make a Cake, Build a Building and Make a Rainbow, children in Year 1 and above now spell each ingredient, brick and colour on a letter bank instead of dragging a labelled picture. Reception keeps the picture-matching exactly as it was. Spelling is something you do now, not something you guess. Tapping every letter in turn used to give the answer away one letter at a time. A letter counts when your child drags it into place, and the whole word is checked once it is finished. Every game has had a tidy-up. One calm colour for anything you tap, photographs and boards left white so they stay easy to read, and a lot of panels, borders and labels taken away so the game itself is what you see. Fixes: the paint blobs in Make a Rainbow can be dragged again on smaller phones, the Android back swipe no longer interrupts the game you are playing, British spellings now appear properly on iPhone and iPad, and the letter drawer in ABC Gap is readable in dark mode and sits clear of the home bar. Spell Duel sorts its words by how hard they are to spell rather than how long they are, so a tricky short word no longer turns up before an easy long one. Fredle's word list shows every word it asks for: a few were counted in the total but never listed, which quietly made the last words of a puzzle impossible to find. Still calm, still ad-free.