What’s new — Close Enuf

23 September 2026

The clue is a clue again, not a description

For most of the last week the clue has been describing the whole picture. Today's read "In the part of a home where people settle in, cushions are squared, tables are bare, and loose possessions have been herded into nearby corners" — which is less a clue than the answer, reworded.
The writer was asked to say where the thing is, what it belongs to, what it is doing and when you'd see it, and since last week it has been saying all four at once. It now picks one of them and stops, and it is told plainly not to describe what is happening in the picture — that part is for the board to give away.
A fuller clue will still turn up now and then. It just should not be every day.
The kind of prompt each day is now properly random. Each prompt is one of ten kinds (something outdoors, a scene, a creature, a hunt for the most or least of something, and so on). They used to take turns in something close to a set order. Now each morning is a fresh draw, weighted so that a kind that has come up a lot lately is less likely, which keeps them roughly even over a month without anybody being able to guess tomorrow's.
Drawing day comes round about one day in ten, a little more often than before (it was nearer one in fifteen), and no longer on anything like a schedule.

20 September 2026

The clue was arriving with its last word missing

Today's clue read "In the bathroom, a household textile has just finished one job and is about to start" — and stopped there. The line actually written ended "…and is about to start another." Three characters over an internal length limit, and the game quietly cut it back to the last whole word and printed the result as if it were finished.
It has been doing that for as long as the clue has existed. Any clue over 90 characters lost its tail, with no full stop and nothing on the screen to say it had been trimmed, which is why nobody caught it: a cut sentence still looks like a sentence.
Clues are no longer cut, and the length they were being cut to is gone entirely. Whoever writes them is no longer given a character count to write to — just "one line" — and whatever comes out is printed as written. Nothing a player reads gets trimmed mid-sentence.

19 September 2026

A screenshot of the clue is no longer worth 75

Somebody screenshotted the clue, submitted it, and the judge gave it 75 out of 100. That beats nine out of ten real photographs ever put on this board, and it was not a fluke — asked again and again, the same image came back 75 every single time.
The reason was one of ours. The clue is written to be true of the day's secret prompt, and the judge reads words in a picture as part of the picture. So a screenshot of the clue was a photograph of a correct answer, written down. Checked against every closed day since launch, it would have worked on about one day in four — and on six of those it would have won the day outright, fired at 7am without taking a single photograph.
It is closed now. Before a high score is allowed to stand, one more question gets asked about the picture: was a camera pointed at something, or was a screen captured? A screenshot of writing scores 0.
Photographs with words in them are untouched, and that was the hard part. Shop signs, calendars, books, fridge magnets, labels on jars, a word drawn in the dust — still judged on what they show, exactly as before. Three simpler versions of this fix were written and thrown away, because each one quietly cost honest shots real points; one of them took a frame that was leading the day from 72 down to 15.
Nothing you have already scored has changed.

19 September 2026

Once you know how to play, the game stops explaining itself

From your third day, the day screen is just the round. The how-to block, "Sealed until 7pm", the line about the prompt being secret, the daily 7am reminder, the paragraph explaining the early-bird multiplier, the sentence about how shots 3, 4 and 5 are worth less, the key under the board and yesterday's finished round have all stopped rendering for players who have been here a few days. What's left is the clue, the clock, the meter, your box, what your next shot is worth, and the board.
The clue is now the biggest thing on the screen, which it should have been all along — it is the only line that is new each morning, and it was sitting under a headline saying the prompt was sealed, which it is every day.
On a phone, the upload box has come up from two and a half screens down to half a screen, and the top of the board from two and a half screens to just under one.
Nothing changed for anybody on their first or second day. The explanations are all still there, in the same order, including the taper before you spend a single shot. And the 7am reminder is still one tap away on the evening screen and in your profile.

17 September 2026

The prompt has a thing in it again, and the clue points at it

The prompt stopped describing and went back to naming. A player wrote in to say that the last couple of days had aimed at what something was doing rather than at what it was, and that this made them close to unguessable. He was right, and it was worse than two days: 18 of the last 20 prompts were the same sentence — "a ⟨thing⟩ that ⟨has a feeling about its life⟩". A cup that dreams, a calendar that has abandoned hope, a wall that wishes it could tell its own stories. Funny once. Not twenty times, and not when the shape of tomorrow is guessable before it drops. Today's prompts read more like "A pigeon making an extremely questionable landing" and "The toast, one second from becoming a small disaster".
The clue is now worth reading. Handed to somebody who has not seen the prompt and given five guesses, the old clue landed on the right subject one day in ten. The new one lands five days in ten — on the days where working out the subject is the game. On the days where the subject is easy and the trick is finding the best example of it, the clue still deliberately tells you nothing about what to photograph, because that is the day the board is for.
The judge's one-liners got funnier, and there are more of them. Roughly half the time, the line under a frame was the judge declining to say anything, because its own leak guard kept refusing what it wrote. It writes better lines now and gets refused less often, so far more frames end up with an actual comment under them.
What scores your picture has not changed. The scoring is the one part of this deliberately left exactly as it was: it was tested against the new model and the new one gave the same photograph a different number too often. Same judge, same rubric, same number.
And it costs about a seventh of what it did, which matters for a game that publishes its running costs and asks you to chip in.

14 September 2026

A held frame is properly held

Fixed: you could read the answer off a sealed board. Every picture had its blurred version, its thumbnail and its stored frame filed under predictable names, so anybody who knew to edit one word of an image address could fetch the picture behind a HELD frame — the one thing the game promises not to show until 7pm. All three now have names nobody can guess.
The same edit also reached the larger stored copy of anybody's photograph, on any frame, held or not. It is out of public reach entirely now. The game shows a 512-pixel square and there is no longer a bigger version of it anybody can fetch.
Blurred frames are staying. The blur was never how the answer got out — sixteen pixels square is sixteen pixels square — so a sealed board still shows you the light and the colour of the shot that is beating you.
Every stored picture is now square, which is what the board, the archive and the preview you see before you send have always shown. That means the judge scores the same crop you were shown: send a tall photograph and it is no longer marked on the top and bottom that were about to be cut off anyway.

9 September 2026

Win two days running and the board says so

A player who has won the last few game days back to back is marked on the board, from two up: Won 2 beside their rank, on the live sheet and on the night screen. There is one winner a day, so winning two days running means beating everybody twice — which until now was a thing you could only work out by going and reading the archive.
It is different from the Run mark beside it, which counts days you turned up rather than days you won, and it takes that mark's place rather than sitting next to it — winning three days running means turning up three days running, so printing both would be two ways of saying one thing.
The standings page shows both, because a row there has the width a caption under a photograph does not.
Your own profile counts it too, under “On a roll”, once you have one.
Today never counts against you. The day has no winner until 7pm, so a run stays intact all through the round you are still playing.

4 September 2026

The evening result is written for you

The 7pm notification now says something different depending on who you are. It used to send everyone the same sentence — “Gerald, it turns out you were Close Enuf” — which is right on the night screen, where the whole board is underneath it, and reads like somebody else’s notification when it lands on your lock screen on its own.
If you won, it still says so, by name. That has not changed and it is not going to.
If you played and missed, it tells you who took the day and how far off you were. The gap is the bit worth knowing.
If you did not play, it is simply the news: who was Close Enuf, and what they scored.

4 September 2026

Account is now Profile

The settings page is called Profile, and lives at /profile. Old links and bookmarks to /account still work — including the “turn these emails off” link in every notification email already sent.
The page reads as settings first. Your display name, your password, the email switches and how you sign in are at the top; the push switches and your record of play have moved down under them.
On a phone, the game now asks about notifications once. If Close Enuf is not on your Home Screen it says so, because on an iPhone that is the only way it can ever buzz you — and once it is there, it asks whether you want it to. Asked once each, per device, and “not now” means not again.

2 September 2026

A crown, a title and the punchline

The end of the day is now worth turning up for.

“Turns out you were Close Enuf.” At 7pm the winner is told so by name, in front of everybody. Everyone else is told exactly how much they missed by, which is the more interesting number.
One standings board, and it rolls. Your best shots from the last 10 rounds, added up, today included. The week, month, year and all-time boards are retired: four answers to “who is winning” is none, and three of them were uncatchable if you turned up late. This one is always winnable and moves by lunchtime.
A crown beside the name of whoever is top of that board, on the live board, the night screen, the archive and the standings page.
A title for the top 50. One per position, and they are not flattering in any consistent direction. Tap anybody’s name to see theirs, where they stand, their ten-day total and what run they are on. You are told when yours changes.
Runs are marked from three days up.
When the crown changes hands the day says so, and remembers it — the archive still says it a month later.

2 September 2026

Chipping in

Close Enuf has no advertising and nothing to sell, so the footer of every page now carries a running balance: everything the game has cost to run since it went live, against everything players have put in. Gold when it is covered, flame when it is short.

Tap the figure for the arithmetic, the list of donors, and a box to chip in through Stripe.
The sums are shown, not asserted. The AI half is exact, priced per call and frozen at the moment it was made. The server-and-storage half is a share of a box that runs about twenty-six other sites, and the page says so rather than rolling it into one number you cannot interrogate.
No card details ever reach this site. Payment is Stripe’s own hosted page.

2 September 2026

Today’s board, for a screen on a shelf

A small read-only feed at /api/today — the day’s top scores, who they are by, whether the day has been won, and enough of the clock to count down with. Built for a pixel display, public because everything on it is already on the public board. It carries no image, no quip and, while the window is open, no prompt.

31 August 2026

Say something back

Until now everything on a frame was said by the game: the score, the judge’s line, the rank. You can now say something too.

Five marks — Laugh, Love, Nice, Wow, Ugh — on anybody’s shot but your own. They are drawn rather than borrowed emoji, so they sit on the board in the board’s own colour and weight.
They cost nothing and win nothing. The judge decides what a picture is worth; you decide what you think of it. No mark moves a score.
A frame shows only the marks it was actually given, with the rest behind a +, so the sheet stays a sheet of photographs.
A held shot gets none until 7pm. You cannot have an opinion about a picture the game is not showing you.
A shot sent at 6.59pm now gets an answer. If the window shut while your photo was still going up, the page used to reload over the top of the reply and leave you with nothing. It waits for the answer now, and tells you plainly if you were too late.
The preview is cropped square, the way the picture will actually be published, so you can see what you are sending before you send it.
Uploads come back faster, and no longer hold up the rest of the server while your photo is processed.

26 August 2026

A different kind of prompt every day

Six days running, the prompt had been a household object with a mood attached — an appliance, a utensil, a plant, a chair, a lamp, a blanket. It was getting predictable.

The subject rotates now: an everyday object, something outdoors, a scene, a creature, a state or a moment, a superlative hunt, an odd pairing, a colour, a place.
The mood is optional. A prompt is allowed to be a plain thing plainly asked for; which thing is the hard part, and the board is what tells you.
Drawing day. Occasionally the prompt asks for something you could never photograph — a mountain range, a comet — because it has to be drawn by hand and photographed. It says so on the day screen, and the judge marks a photo of the real thing down however well it matches.

25 August 2026

The prompt is ready at seven

The day’s prompt used to be written at 7am, which meant ten or twenty seconds of “no prompt today, yet” for anybody sitting there waiting for the drop. It is now written quietly at five to, and announced on the stroke of seven. If you have the page open when it lands, the page finds it on its own — no refreshing.

24 August 2026

A thumbnail, and nothing bigger

Your photograph is now published as a 512-pixel square and at no larger size anywhere in the game. The tap-to-enlarge view in the archive and the full-size winner’s picture on the night screen are both gone.

The reason is not rivals, it is you. You photograph whatever is in front of you in the four minutes before the window shuts, and the rest of the kitchen is in it, and so is the paperwork on the desk, the address on the parcel and whoever is reflected in the window. A thumbnail on a public board is what you agreed to. A file somebody can pinch into is a different thing, and it is a different thing for ever, because the board is archived.

Your verdict now reaches you even if you lock the phone, switch apps or reload while the judge is thinking. It used to be handed to one open tab and nowhere else, so a shot the judge could not score simply disappeared.

22 August 2026

A judge worth reading

The quip stopped repeating your score. It used to say how warm you were, which the number on your frame already says. It now says which way you were wrong — wrong room, right thing in the wrong mood, wrong scale, too literal — which is the thing you can actually work with.
It is written by a better model, and told the day’s own banned vocabulary, so a joke can be sharp without handing over the answer.
It stopped grading you. No notes, no advice, no “needs work”. It is a joke about your photograph, not feedback on your effort.

21 August 2026

A day you can actually work out

The board had spent a fortnight being a column of identical low scores, on a game that tells you the board is your only clue. Three things were quietly making that unavoidable, and all three changed on the same day.

The prompt names a thing. The joke lives in what is asked about the thing rather than in there being no thing at all. By mid-morning the board should have converged on “it’s a mug”; which mug is what separates a 60 from a 90.
The clue points at it. It says what the object is for, where it lives, or what you do with it, and it has to be true.
The quips say how close. A 20 and a 70 no longer read identically.
And you can be told when anybody puts a shot up, if you want — one more switch on the notifications card. On a game where the board is the clue, that is the one notification that is genuinely information rather than an announcement.

19 August 2026

The board reads like a board

Best first, everywhere. The sheet had been ordered by time while each frame was stamped with its rank, so the numbers ran 03, 01, 04, 02 down the page. A player in the lead could read her own board and conclude she had lost it. It is ranked again.
A shot that just landed says New, which is what the old ordering was really for and works even when the shot ranks twenty-second.
#04, not 04, so the number says what it is.
Where you stand is the first thing on the screen once you have taken a shot: your best, what it scored, where it sits, and how many shots you have left.
The reveal stopped contradicting itself. The big number used to count up while the working underneath already showed the final figure, so for about a second the screen said you had scored 44 and 82 at the same time.
It also says what the number is out of. “101.22 points” over “how close: 74 out of 100” — because the big figure is multiplied and routinely lands over a hundred, and nothing on the screen said which scale it was on.
The rules and the sums are set at a size they can be read at, on a phone, outdoors, without leaning in.

18 August 2026

One clue a day

There was deliberately no hint mechanic at all. Then a day whose prompt was “The most confused fruit in your kitchen right now” drew a kettle, a cat, the sun and a stop button, and shooting first thing became a coin toss rather than a bet.

So: one line, once a day, under the sealed prompt. It is written by a machine that is not allowed to use any of the prompt’s own words — for that prompt it could say neither “fruit” nor “kitchen” and would have had to write something like “indoors, and having a bad day”. Nothing else about the secret loosened.

A held shot now shows a blur of the picture rather than a blank rectangle. The board is billed as your only clue, and a sealed one made of grey squares was the game withdrawing its own promise. The quip stays hidden.
A shot is held from 85 rather than 70. At 70 a normal day’s board went dark and stopped being a clue at all.
Something to send. Every screen has a share button now: a block of squares, one per shot, shaded by how close you got, plus your best score and the day. While the window is open it says nothing about the prompt, so you can fire it into the group chat without handing anybody the answer.

18 August 2026

The day closes at 7pm

It was 9pm. The whole twelve-hour window and everything measured against it moved with it, so waiting now costs about 17% more per hour than it did.

18 August 2026

Smaller things

Updates that did not earn a headline of their own.

You can delete your account, from the foot of the settings page. Your pictures go with it. The one thing that stays is the record of money actually spent on running the game.
A one-tap reminder for the 7am drop, on the screen where you would want one rather than buried in settings.
Display names are checked for what they are made of and for what they say, since they go on a public board next to somebody else’s photograph.
The name suggested when you sign up is your first name, not half your email address.
Text throughout went to the highest contrast grade, and the judge’s line stopped being small, grey and italic all at once.
Nothing on the day screen argues about an empty board any more. It tells you what going first is worth, and the shot that opens the day is marked First up.
Deleting a shot asks first, in a dialog that cannot stop working.
Signing in lands you on the game, not on whatever page you happened to bounce off twenty minutes earlier.
A wrong password is reported in the box you typed it in, instead of in the other form and the page banner as well.

17 August 2026

Notifications, and Close Enuf on your home screen

A bell in the header turns on notifications for this device. Three things to be told about: the 7am drop, the 7pm result, and being knocked off the top.
Add to Home Screen and Close Enuf opens like an app. On an iPhone that is not a nicety — it is the only way Safari will hand over notifications at all, and the screen tells you so.
Email is a separate set of switches, because wanting the drop as a buzz and the result as an email is an ordinary thing to want.

17 August 2026

Yesterday’s round, and a gentler taper

The foot of the day screen shows the last finished round — its winning picture, its prompt now that it is no longer a secret, and who took it.
The shot taper softened. A fifth shot used to lose 60% of its value; it now loses 30%. Your first two still count in full.
Your picture stays on screen while it is judged, and the page no longer jumps out from under you when you send it.

15 August 2026

The prompt goes dark

The prompt used to be the headline of the day screen. That is the entire game given away in one line of type, so it went, along with two other things that had to change with it.

Nobody sees the prompt while the window is open. Not the text, not a category. It is revealed at the close.
Your day is worth your best shot, not the sum of your five. The other four cost nothing and win nothing; they exist to buy information.
A shot the judge rates very highly hides its picture until the close, keeping its rank, its name and its score. A spot-on image is not a clue, it is the answer, and without this one perfect shot at 9am ends the day for everybody.
The judge was told to stop describing what it was looking for. A quip is a joke about what you sent, never about what was wanted.

15 August 2026

The darkroom

A complete redesign. The game is photographs — you shoot blind, the frames go up on a board, and at the close the whole day develops at once — so the interface is a photographer’s contact sheet: mechanical type, hairline rules, square frames, and a single safelight red.

The board is a sheet of frames, two up on a phone, rather than a list of rows.
A held shot reads as undeveloped paper.
The multiplier is an exposure meter with a ruled scale and a needle.
The leaderboard is a standings table, not a podium.
The generated artwork, the glows and the gradients all went. Your uploads are the images.

15 August 2026

Close Enuf, day one

The first playable build.

A prompt a day at 7am, written by a machine and never repeated.
Five shots each, until the window shuts.
An AI judge scoring every picture 0–100 and answering with one cheeky line.
Two multipliers: shoot early and score higher, shoot often and score less.
A public board, an archive of finished rounds, and leaderboards.
Two ways in, both landing on one account: a link mailed to you, or an ordinary password if you would rather.
Sign in with Apple arrived the same week, as a third.