Focus: just you and the puzzle

A puzzle wants your whole attention, and the page kept offering it other things: menus across the top, a footer full of links, more ways to play underneath. All useful. None of it the move.

So on a laptop there’s now Focus, at the top right of the puzzles. Press it and the site’s menus and footer step aside, the board takes the room they leave, and what’s left is the position, your moves and how you’re doing. The mode menu stays, so Today, Practice and the rest are still a click away, and the tower beside Exit focus still takes you home. Focus stays on in this browser, puzzle after puzzle, until you press Exit focus.

The page tidied up around the board too. The puzzle of the day no longer sits on top of the one you’re solving: on a laptop it’s a scroll down, above the collections, with Play and the past days, right beside Picked for you, where you choose what to practice. Beside the board there’s the puzzle and how you’re doing, and that’s it. Even the heading got quieter: what the puzzle’s worth, then whose move it is, then the moves, written straight on the page. The pieces you take land beside them with no box round them, and on the 3D table they’re the 3D set’s own pieces.

And a title that floats

The word “Puzzles” at the top has made way for a puzzle piece, drawn in the same fine line as the figures on a Castle’s page, and cut from the edge of the puzzle, because those are the ones you start with. It hovers over its shadow and turns to see where your pointer is, which is more than most titles do. The gap in its side is where the right move goes.

On a phone nothing’s changed: the board already has the screen to itself.