Profiles v2, Leaderboards, Handling! • July 9, 2026

Since the last update, we've built out an entire competitive layer for the game!

Leaderboards, player profiles, and a keyboard-handling system borrowed straight from a particular genre of stackers (and an office-style software), plus a pile of smaller fixes that make everything feel more solid. Here's everything that's new.

👑 Leaderboards

Shikaku+ now has real leaderboards. See how you rank against the world and your country with 4 capital metrics. Stay competitive!

Tap any name on a leaderboard and it opens that player's profile card. And if you don't want to scroll to find yourself, your own rank on any board is surfaced directly on your profile.

We know not everyone wants to be on a public leaderboard. You can choose to display your name to the world, or appear as "Anonymous" — still ranked, but with information hidden to solve squares in private.

👤 Player profiles

Every player now has a real profile! A shareable card you can open from the home screen or your Account page. It shows a banner you will be able to edit soon, your equipped badge and display name, your player tag, your country flag (if you choose to show one), and a curated set of your stats, including how long you've played and when your account was created.

You get to decide what shows up on it. A badge rack lets you feature up to three favorite badges, separate from the one badge you actually wear day to day. A stat rack does the same for up to three stats you're proud of.

A few identity details got real settings, too:

- Country is detected automatically the first time you connect on the web version, with a toggle to hide it.

*You may also file for a country change if you've connected to the game for the first time in a different country from where you usually play in.

- Display name changes are now limited to once every 30 days, to keep leaderboards and profiles from being used to impersonate other players.

⌨️ Handling - keyboard players, rejoice

If you've ever played a competitive puzzle or stacking game, you know how much "feel" matters when you're holding down a direction key. We built a dedicated Handling page that gives you the same kind of control:

- How long before a held key starts repeating.

- How fast it repeats once it does.

- A short cooldown when you change direction, so you don't overshoot when

reversing quickly.

There are presets from "Super Heavy" to "Super Light", and one tuning exactly feeling like your 9-5. This is the perfect game if you want to translate your spreadsheet skills to a competitive advantage, plus a live practice board built right into the settings page so you can feel tunings before committing to it.

Alongside the new page, we fixed a handful of keyboard bugs that had been making the cursor feel inconsistent:

- Quickly tapping two directions in a row could occasionally fling the cursor all the way to the far wall.

- Holding a direction at high speed could stutter or lag.

- A deeper timing bug (on both browser and Windows) could deliver a single keypress twice, making the cursor feel "mushy" or jump unpredictably, especially while holding Ctrl and tapping arrow keys.

- The on-screen crosshair no longer visually lags behind its real position after a fast move.

⏲️ Time Attack: cleaner rules, clearer clock

Time Attack got a rules pass. Reset puzzle no longer gives you a free restart mid-run — instead, New game (from the menu or the R key) fully restarts the run with a fresh clock, so a reset actually costs you something.

We also decoupled the countdown from board size. The clock is now set by difficulty — Easy 2:30, Medium 2:00, Hard 1:30, Brutal 1:00 — so board size only changes how complex the puzzle is, not how much time you're given.

The challenge scales more predictably across sizes now.

🧩 Help Me! links, improved

Sending a "Help Me!" link to a friend is smoother in a few ways:

- Links now carry your player tag, so whoever opens it sees your live name and badge, not a stale snapshot, when they're online. It works perfectly offline, and old links keep working too.

- Opening a friend's shared link no longer dumps you behind a login wall first. You land straight on their board. Huge update for making your boss play Shikaku+ on office hours!

- If you solve their puzzle and send it back without a name set yet, you're prompted to set one first, so they know who bailed them out.

- On Android, tapping a shared shikaku.plus link opens directly in the app instead of just a browser tab.

🎨 Polish

- All notifications (badge pop-ups, status messages like "puzzle loaded" or "link copied," everything) now share one consistent toast style with a countdown bar and a close button, replacing the old mix of styles.

- Notifications no longer interrupt the login screen or pop up over an active board — they wait their turn.

- Your favorite ruleset (Classic/Hokan) and favorite mode (Time Attack / Blitz / Tekazu) are now tracked and shown as two separate stats, instead of one stat that used to conflate the two.

- Fastest-clear stats are now tracked per board size and difficulty, and there's a new "most efficient clears" stat for your cleanest solves.

- Stats now load in about 2 seconds when you're offline instead of hanging, and anything you did offline safely merges back in once you reconnect.

- The Account page and profile no longer flash/collapse when you save a change.

- Daily Puzzle can no longer be reset or swapped for a new one via the R key or settings.

- The home screen's account button is now labeled "Profile."

- Fixed the Android back button closing the whole app instead of returning to the menu during Quick Game, Zen, or Daily Puzzle.

- Country flags are now real flag artwork, with a distinct globe icon for players without a supported flag.

That's everything for this round.

💛🟨 Thank you for playing Shikaku+!

sagings