Six more games in Circle voice rooms: Backgammon (Tawla) played as a match with the doubling cube, Dominoes for two to four (partners sit opposite, as across the Arab world), Ludo for two to four, Tarneeb for four in two partnerships (a computer player can take an empty seat), Werewolf for five to sixteen with Kemble as the narrator, and Common thread, Kemble’s own team word game, in English or Arabic. Kemble’s servers deal, roll and check every move, and every secret hand, role or key stays with the person it belongs to.
More activities is now a shelf: search by name or by another word (“poker”, “draughts”), shelves for board, card, word, party, drawing and watching games, a featured row, your favourites and what you played recently, and how many play and how long a game takes on every card. Arrow keys move between cards, and choosing a card starts it. Word race can be played in Arabic, Texas hold’em no longer asks anyone for more chips than another player can match, game names are spelt one way everywhere, Battleship and Dots and boxes boards fill a phone’s width, and a community’s saved list of games gains new games when it held every game there was.
Stages get the voice room’s call bar: icons alone in grouped pills, each with an instant tip, one Record button that offers Record the room or Record sound only, the slow red border and the Recording pill beside ON AIR, and a red hang-up drawn as a handset, as it now is in voice rooms too. Where a room or stage is too narrow, Record folds under More as one entry with its two choices. If a recording cannot start, the reason now shows above the call controls. Alone in a call, the empty seat sits beside your tile. In your menu, Appearance’s four themes sit in two even columns under their label.
Real names in calls: captions, reactions, shared screens, sounds and the encryption notice in Circle voice rooms and stages name the person, asking for the name when it is not known yet, and a profile card opened before it loads uses the name Kemble already has. Menus, popovers and pickers Kemble draws itself now stay open when you click inside a window they opened, or on the QA notes toolbar, and Escape closes the top one first; in Kemble Work, the call’s More stays open under Audio & video settings.
Your camera: 1080p is now sent as 1080p and a frame rate of 60 as 60, where the room allows it, and a change made during a call reaches everyone without reconnecting. Voice & video settings now has the full camera panel under its preview, and the camera window opened over your live camera follows it if the camera turns off. Captions keep the language you chose for your next call, clips and dictation hear Arabic and English as live captions do, and the reactions tray is a compact box above the call buttons. A community’s own emoji are checked against the room’s community, and the entrance-sound preview plays at the level you set for that sound.
And #211’s loose ends: a Circle conversation opened cold no longer shifts as its pinned bar, catch-up and role tags arrive, and it can take focus straight away; a live connection that fails for a reason other than a busy server no longer slows every tab.