Notable changes to Penguin Pebbling — both the game (the cards, the prompts, how a card is shown) and the site (penguinpebbling.app). Newest first; dates are the day a change went live. The site deploys continuously, so there are no version numbers.
Each dated entry is split into Game and Site. An entry only carries the sections that changed.
Site
- The changelog has a feed, so you can follow it without coming back to look. Hand the feed to any feed reader and each dated entry turns up there as it is written — the whole entry, not a line of it with a link. There is no sign-up and no list: a reader asks this site for a file the same way a browser asks for a page, so nobody here knows who is subscribed, and there is nothing new to say on the privacy page. The feed is built from this file by the same tool that builds this page, so it cannot end up saying something the page does not.
Site
- A shared link now previews the card you will actually see. The picture that shows up when someone posts the link was one of the printed cards; since the cards were re-set as text it was showing a game that no longer looked like this one. It is drawn from the real thing now, prompt and all.
- The game works with no connection, and can be installed like an app. Once you have opened the site, the cards, the rules, the five locutions and every page are kept on your device — so a group can play in a room with no signal, which is where a lot of them are. Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app. The printable PDFs are large, so they are kept once you have opened them rather than downloaded in advance. Nothing about this sends anything anywhere; see privacy.
Game
- The cards are set in real text now. Every prompt used to be lettered into a picture, which is right on printed card stock and costly on a screen: the words could not be made bigger on their own, could not re-wrap, could not be read in your own font, selected, copied, translated or handed to a highlighter, and on a phone they stayed small while everything around them adapted. The words are words now, set in the same typeface as the rest of the site — so they fill the screen you are reading on, at whatever size you have asked for. Helen's drawings are still her drawings, and the printable deck is unchanged. On a wide screen the card is wider than the rest of the page, so the prompt has a comfortable line length rather than a narrow ribbon of words; on anything smaller it stacks and uses the full width instead. The card follows dark mode now as well — it used to stay bright cream whatever you had chosen, which on a dark page is a glare line at every edge.
- The prompt printed under each card is here to stay. It went in during the move to this site so the words could be zoomed, reflowed, read in your own font, selected, copied, translated or read aloud — none of which lettering inside a picture allows. Helen has approved it, so it stays.
Site
- The licence has a name now: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The game always said free to use, share and adapt for non-commercial purposes, please credit and link back — this is that, written down, so a school or a clinic can point their own people at something recognised. Nothing that was allowed has stopped being allowed. One thing is now explicit that was not: if you adapt the game and share your version, it carries the same licence. Buying the deck or donating through Helen's shop is unchanged.
- A proper icon on an Android home screen, and a favicon that no longer 404s. Installed to a phone, the pebbles were being shrunk into a white rounded square instead of filling the launcher's own shape; there is a maskable icon for that now. Anything asking for the old-fashioned
/favicon.icowas getting nothing, and now gets the pebbles. - Three accessibility repairs. Jumping to a part of a page — from the skip link at the top, or from a link straight to the licence — was landing with the heading tucked behind the bar that stays at the top of the screen; it stops short of it now. The Privacy link in the footer was a smaller target than the guidelines allow anything standing on its own to be, and is bigger. And in Windows High Contrast mode, which replaces every colour on a page with the reader's own, the locution filter you had chosen stopped looking chosen — it now uses the colours the system sets aside for exactly that.
- The site now publishes an index for language models. The thirty card prompts are drawn into the page by script and appear in nothing that reads the HTML, so anything summarising this site was getting the furniture and none of the game. The index says so in as many words and points at the prompts, which have been published as data since yesterday. It is generated from the pages themselves, so it cannot quietly fall out of date.
Game
- Penguin Pebbling has a home of its own. The game was published at Autistic Realms in May 2026, as a post with the playable half folded into a single block of HTML. It moved here whole: all thirty prompts, all thirty-five card faces, and the three printable guides, unchanged. The original post stays where it is.
- Every card's prompt is now shown as text as well as lettered into the artwork. The words are drawn into the card, which is right for print and costly on a screen — lettering cannot be zoomed on its own, reflowed, set in a reading font, selected, copied, or read aloud by a screen reader picking its way through a page. The card is still the card; the same words sit underneath it, and the alt text carries the whole prompt rather than the first hundred and fifty characters.
- Cards are properly shuffled. The deck was being sorted by a coin flip, which is not the same as shuffling: cards stayed near where they started. On a single-locution filter of six cards, that meant being handed back the prompt you had just answered.
Site
- Everything the game needs is served from here. Thirty-five card images and three PDFs came across, so nothing on this site depends on autisticrealms.com staying where it is. Links to Helen's writing and her shop point at her site, because that is where they belong.
- The game is the front page. For a day it sat below about a thousand words of introduction — you had to scroll past the explanation to reach the thing being explained. How to play, the five locutions, print and download and about have their own pages now, in the menu at the top.
- Set in Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, the Braille Institute's typeface for readers with low vision, self-hosted so no third party learns who is reading. Every size went up, and the scale follows the reader's own browser text-size setting rather than overriding it.
- A sage palette, and a dark mode. Sage is Helen's colour, and it keeps this site from looking like our others. The ground and all five locution tints are sampled from her own card artwork rather than picked to match. Dark mode follows your device and can be overridden with the toggle in the bar; the choice is remembered on your own device and never leaves it.
- The printable deck, the Plain Language guide and the Easy Read guide are all hosted here and free.
- A privacy page, and there is very little on it. A game used by families, schools and clinics should be able to say plainly what it does with your data, so now it does: nothing. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no third parties, and the only thing kept on your device is your light or dark choice — which is never sent anywhere, and is not stored at all unless you touch the toggle. Privacy is linked from the foot of every page.
- Fixes: shared links were showing no preview image, the page was telling search engines to index an address that did not exist yet, a stale stylesheet could survive a day after a change, and a corrected card image would have sat in readers' caches for a year with no way to replace it. All four are corrected.