Update 5.10.0: a proper game entry, per-scene music and English by default

A big update about the "first minute" in the game: how you enter it, what you hear, and what language everything is in.

A PRE-GAME MENU

The "Play" tab used to drop you straight onto the board — the match started automatically. Now you're greeted by a menu: the scene background, the raccoon mascot, and New Game / Settings / City Style buttons. The match starts only when you tap.

Why: first, this is the one calm place to actually look at the background — and we have 19 of them, they're gorgeous. Second, music is playing, so you can browse styles: switch the theme and both the background and the track change. A more "canonical" entry instead of straight into battle. Online, the daily challenge and tournaments still start immediately — a menu there would just be in the way.

MUSIC AND SOUND

Every scene now has its own dynamic track. The music plays in the pre-game menu and while you switch themes — but it gently fades out during the match itself. That's deliberate: players told us background music covered the sound effects, especially the satisfying tower "completion". So music lives in the menu now, and in the match it's effects only.

The effects themselves are procedural: placing a block, transferring, completing a stand, winning and losing — each with its own sound. On iOS the audio is audible even with the hardware silent switch on (we configured the audio session properly), because for a game that's the expected behavior.

ENGLISH BY DEFAULT

The app now defaults to English. Switch it manually and your choice is remembered. The Russian website is unaffected.

We also closed an ugly gap: Russian text was leaking into the English UI in places. The scoreboard showed "Игрок" instead of Player; the victory screen showed "Ходов", "Ещё партию", "Сменить сторону"; plus online, replays, timer settings, the error screen and dozens more. Two causes: 175 translations were simply missing from the English dictionary (the engine fell back to Russian), and some strings were hardcoded past the translator. We swept the whole app, added the missing translations and fixed the hardcoded strings across 19 screens. English mode is now zero Cyrillic.

LOOK AND FEEL

We replaced emojis across the UI with clean vector SVG icons in one consistent style. Buttons and sections used to look a bit "browser-y" and busy in places — now they're calmer and more premium. The app icon is the raccoon mascot instead of the old text logo.

SCREENS AND ORIENTATIONS

Full support for every orientation on iPhone and iPad — portrait and landscape. For a universal app it's also an App Store requirement: the iPad build must work in all four orientations. We fixed a couple of spots where the board "collapsed" on wide screens along the way.

What's next — we're listening to feedback on the music and the menu. If a scene doesn't have the right vibe, the track is a couple of lines to change now.