The Case of The Missing Toast

We pushed out a few updates to the game this week, and the main goal was to make things clearer. We’ve heard feedback from our users that it’s hard to tell what the correct answer is after skipping a word or making the wrong choice. Just yesterday, we received this through our feedback form:

something more obvious when one gets something wrong, otherwise great!

If you’ve been playing for a while, you’re probably familiar with this. You guess a word, and then a tiny red or green box (which we call a “toast”) pops up in the bottom-left corner with the correct answer written inside it. If you’re correct, we blast gold confetti all over the screen.

The problem? The toast is easy to miss.

I noticed it when watching people play: they’d guess, then just stare, totally missing the correction because they weren’t looking at the bottom corner. And the confetti is fun, but it felt a little disconnected.

Never miss your misses

Now, when you answer a word correctly, the entire input area turns green and we fire confetti within it. When you skip a word, the input area turns red and reveals the correct answer. After a second, the answer fades away and the game moves on to the next word.

For multiple choice, we always highlight the correct answer in green. If you choose wrong, your incorrect choice is highlighted in red.

Long story short, we ditched the subtle, easy-to-miss toast for something a little more obvious. We hope you like it!

More visible results

Another great bit of feedback came from a student of my friend Ms. Espie in Hawaii. They expressed that they wanted it to be easier to see all the words they got right and wrong after the game was over.

And they had a point! That information was buried behind a tiny little button inside the post-game stats. If you didn’t already know where to click, you might not find it.

Now, the post-game screen shows a sample of the words you answered front and center. Below that is a button to view all the words from your game, now bigger and easier to spot.

The need for speed

This update went live last night, and today, mere hours later, we’ve already received a pile of feedback from our players. For example:

I do not like the new update because it slows down my time by a lot

Please take away the long green screen for knoward. My class has a competition on who is the fastest, and this makes it Impossible.

Its not very nice that you made a HUGE green screen whenever we get the answer right. I would kindly like if you PLEASEE got RID of this screen, it takes to much time for it to get off my screen.

The feedback all shares a common thread: the new answer animation takes too much time and it’s slowing down the gameplay.

We get it. It’s fun to go fast! But if it feels like something is slowing you down, then that’s no good.

That’s why today we introduced a new game setting called Need for speed that makes those answer reveal animations significantly faster—four times faster, to be exact!

You can find this setting in the Rules menu before starting any pack or Quick Play game. Give it a try and let us know if that’s fast enough for you, speed demons. 👺