A friend of mine can't tell the blue tiles from the purple ones. That's not a small problem in a game where matching tiles is the whole activity, and it turned out to be true in more places than the tile faces once I went looking.
Here's the rule I settled on, and it's the useful part of this release: color is never the only thing that separates two states. Shape carries it, and color reinforces it. Shape survives any palette, and it survives your eyes.
So, a locked tile shows two solid bars when the lock is strong and one broken bar when it's weak, instead of red against yellow. A tile you've picked is framed on all four sides in near white, instead of turning a slightly different teal. A tag the letters you've typed still match is underlined, on both tables, not just brighter. A board you've left running shows a broken bar rather than merely a hot one. A tool you can't use is struck through.
The trace meter has its own color now, too. It was sharing one with the selection highlight, which meant the same teal was saying two unrelated things.
Two fixes I want to mention because they were real bugs hiding behind the accessibility work. The tracker's playhead row was drawn in exactly the same color as a bar line, so you couldn't tell where playback was, and if it landed on the row you were editing it vanished completely. And the objective's marker on a covered tile was painted on top of whatever covered it, so it looked like it belonged to the wrong tile.
There's also a small thing that isn't small: the devlog is now News, and it's for release posts like this one. The longer writing about how the game was made has moved into a History section on the About page, where it reads better as one piece.
", "summary": "Color is never the only difference now: between two tiles, two locks, or a meter gone bad." }, { "id": "https://crashthestack.com/news/0-1-1/", "url": "https://crashthestack.com/news/0-1-1/", "title": "0.1.1, the rewards show", "date_published": "2026-09-24T10:00:00Z", "content_html": "A small release, three days after the first one, mostly about moments that were landing flat.
The rewards show. Finishing a run used to just hand you the results. Now the cabinet unfolds, the loot flies, and the way down is encrypted until you've taken the layer. It's the same information, but you get to watch it happen.
A tap in the letterbox opens the gate. On a phone the game sits inside black bars, and tapping them did nothing. That's a reasonable thing for a player to try, so now it works.
The dialer's lines are readable. There's a dark strip behind them now, so the line that hasn't been reached yet doesn't disappear into the backdrop.
The tracker carries its own tunes. If you'd opened the tracker from anywhere other than the site root, its tunes and its icon both failed to load, because they were resolving relative to where the game used to sit. It carries them with it now, so it works wherever it's served.
", "summary": "The rewards get their moment, the letterbox takes a tap, and the tracker carries its tunes." }, { "id": "https://crashthestack.com/news/0-1-0/", "url": "https://crashthestack.com/news/0-1-0/", "title": "0.1.0, the first release", "date_published": "2026-09-21T10:00:00Z", "content_html": "This is the first release of Crash The Stack that anyone else can play, and after three abandoned attempts at this same game it feels good to write that sentence!
What's in it: STACK, which is Mahjongg solitaire with a trace counting down; DEFRAG, which is Klondike with packets instead of playing cards; and the overworld hub that ties runs together. You can play it in a browser at /jack-in/, and you can install it as an app from your phone's browser menu.
It's a 0.1, so I want to be straight about what that means. The games are complete and the rules are what you would expect. The parts around them are still early. There's more to come in the hub, the music is still being written, and some of it will change under you between now and 1.0.
The About page has the longer version of what this is and how it's made.
", "summary": "The first release. STACK, DEFRAG and the hub, in a browser or installed on a phone." } ] }