0.3, DECRYPT
There's a fifth game in Crash The Stack! DECRYPT is a match-3, the kind of game Bejeweled made famous, and with five tables now, FREE PLAY needed a better way to show them all. So this release has a new FREE PLAY menu too.
DECRYPT
The board is an 8x8 grid of glyphs in six shapes, and each shape has its own color. Swap two neighbors to line up three or more of a kind and they decrypt: the glyphs clear, the column falls, and new ones drop in from the top. If the new glyphs line up too, that's a chain, and every link in a chain multiplies what it scores.
Bigger matches leave something behind. Four in a row makes a BURST, which clears the 3x3 around it when it goes off. A row and a column crossing in an L or a T makes a SWEEP, which takes out the whole row and column. Five in a row makes a WILDCARD: swap it with any glyph and every glyph of that kind on the board clears at once.
There are three ways to play. TIMED gives you 90 seconds, and long chains and specials buy you a little more time. The DAILY BOARD is the same 40 moves for everyone each day, with a streak for the days you finish it. ENDLESS is just you and the board, for as long as you want. If the board ever runs out of moves, it REKEYs: the same glyphs shuffle into a board you can play, so you never get stuck.
On a phone you swipe a glyph toward its neighbor, or tap one and then the other. With a mouse you can click twice or drag. On a keyboard the arrows (or h, j, k and l) move a cursor, and Space then an arrow makes the swap.
Here's the part I like most: the board plays along with the music. Every collision makes a sound, and each one lands on the next sixteenth note of the song that's playing, so a cascade comes out as a little run of notes in time with the beat. A long chain also pushes the song into its tense section until things cool down. The living background plays behind the board too, dimmed so it doesn't get in your way, pulsing on the beat and flaring up when a chain goes off.
INTERCEPT gets the whole soundtrack
INTERCEPT launched with five songs. Now it has all sixteen songs from the soundtrack, from Obsidian Index at 84 BPM up to Glass Current at 172. Every chart is still built from the song itself, so every packet is a note you can hear.
With that many songs the list scrolls now: use the arrows, the UP and DOWN buttons, or swipe it on a phone. The highlighted song plays a preview from its tense section, so you can hear what you're picking before you start. And the living background now plays behind the lanes too, lifting on each beat.
CALIBRATE is better at reading players who hear the click late, which is most Bluetooth headphones and a lot of phone speakers. If CALIBRATE gave you a strange OFFSET before, give it another try.
A new FREE PLAY
FREE PLAY used to be a list, and with five games it was getting long. Now it's a row of tiles you scroll through sideways, one per game, each showing a picture of its board, the name of the classic it's based on, and your best score or streak. Use the arrow keys (or h and l, or j and k), or swipe on a phone. Tap a tile to bring it to the middle, and tap it again to open it. FREE PLAY remembers where you left it, so the game you had selected is still there when you come back.
DEFRAG's DRAW and SCORING settings are on its own screen in FREE PLAY now, so you don't have to start a board to change them.
Smaller things
If your browser can't run WebGL 2 (it's switched off, or your graphics driver isn't supported), the game used to fail with a cryptic error. Now it tells you what's wrong and how to fix it.
The site now counts visits with Plausible, which uses no cookies and collects no personal data, so I can see whether anyone is actually playing. The game itself only reports when it's played here on crashthestack.com.
I hope you enjoy decrypting some packets!