# Tadpole Games — Kid phonics puzzle games

> Kid phonics puzzle games (iPhone/iPad app by Difflex.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/tadpole-games/id6775974514 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Difflex](https://appshunter.io/developer/1895264643)
- Category: Education, Games, Family
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 15.0 · 82 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-06-12
- Data updated: 2026-09-04
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/tadpole-games/id6775974514/reviews.md

## What is Tadpole Games?

I built these games so my five-year-old twins could practise what they’re learning at school: reading, writing, numbers, languages and the wider world.
Perfect for Travelling, Long Waiting or just Improving Bedtime.

GAMES SO FAR
• Fredle — a word puzzle that follows the order of phonics sounds taught in UK schools reception class (Sets 1, 2 and 3). Trace letters to build real words.
• Fred Fix — fix the jumbled, missing or wrong letter to spell the word. Perfect early phonics practice.
• Sumdle — friendly number puzzles to build mental maths.
• Flagle — see a famous landmark, tap the country’s flag. Geography made playful.
• Spanish Flagle, Spanish Words & Spanishdle — a first, gentle taste of Spanish vocabulary and sounds.
• Flowerdle & Leafdle — match real photos of flowers and leaves. A little bit of nature, every day.

Terms of Use: https://tadpolegames.com/terms.html


## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 1.9 — 2026-09-02

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.

### 1.8 — 2026-08-17

Small fixes and improvements under the hood.

Nothing has changed in the games themselves — this update corrects how the app reports an install, so we can tell which of our own ads actually bring families to Tadpole and stop paying for the ones that do not.

As before: no advertising identifier is ever read, no tracking permission is asked for, and nothing about what your child does in the app is shared.

### 1.7 — 2026-08-14

Spell Duel is here.

Something comes flying at your frog — a carrot, a crocodile, a helicopter — and the thing in the air is the word. Spell it before it lands, and naming it stops it dead in the air.

• The picture is the only clue, so the word has to be worked out, not copied.
• Get three in a row and the words get longer. Miss one and it eases back, and it never drops below a length you have already mastered.
• It starts at three letters with the letters laid out for you, and climbs to ten — helicopter, playground, toothbrush — spelled on a bare keyboard with no help at all.
• Both duellists are the Tadpole frog. The one doing the throwing wears a pirate's bandana and an eye patch.

It is the first Tadpole game made for older children, roughly seven to eleven, and the first with a clock. There are no lives, no health bars and no way to lose — just a timer you can beat.

Also in this update: a purchase could fail if our advert measurement was slow to answer. It no longer can.

Still calm, still ad-free.

### 1.6 — 2026-08-11

Spell Duel gets the Tadpole look:

• Both duellists are now the Tadpole frog rather than a jumble of animals, and the one doing the throwing wears a pirate hat.
• You spell the thing being thrown, and it is always shown as a picture — so the word is decoded, not just copied.

Also in this update:
• Fredle's Year 3/4 and Year 5/6 tiers play on a bigger 4x4 board, so the long statutory spellings — disappear, interfere, parliament — actually fit and can be found.
• Puzzles build much faster, so there is less waiting when you start a game or change difficulty.

Behind the scenes, this version lets us tell whether our own adverts brought someone to the app. It is measured by Apple, in aggregate, and there is no tracking prompt, no advertising identifier, and nothing collected about what your child plays. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what is and is not shared.

Still calm, still ad-free.

### 1.5 — 2026-08-10

Fredle gets a bigger board for older children:

• The Year 3/4 and Year 5/6 spelling tiers now play on a 4x4 grid. The statutory spellings for those years are long words, and most of them simply never fitted on the small board — disappear, interfere, parliament and the rest can finally be found.
• Every one of those puzzles now holds at least one of the year's statutory spellings, so the tier actually teaches the words it is named after.
• Puzzles are built far more quickly, so there is much less waiting when you start a game or change difficulty.

Also fixed:
• Games use the whole screen properly, instead of squashing into the top of it with empty space underneath.
• Deleting your account no longer tells you your subscription has ended when it has not.
• Buttons no longer stay looking pressed after you tap them.

Still calm, still ad-free.

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-04.*