apterous.org

Here's your handy cut-out-and-keep guide to the events of August 2026.

In the news...

• 1st August. Spectators are no longer announced in game chat.
• 1st August. Michael Owen is now available as a Dictionary Corner guest.
• 2nd August. A total of 35 Duel Necklaces were awarded for July 2026.
• 2nd August. Some older game recaps for which the letters round maxes have been lost have been restored, or clearly marked as unknown where that's impossible.
• 3rd August. Apterous Prune now picks a random number of large numbers if you do.
• 3rd August. Mr Dog now buzzes in with the answer again when you get a conundrum wrong.
• 4th August. Game recaps now show conundrum difficulty stats.
• 5th August. Super Gym now offers an immediate "next game" link.
• 5th August. There's now an item for reaching your Top Dog target without taking a single strike. Good luck!
• 6th August. All leader boards are now browsable, so you can see the full list of players outside of the top 25.
• 6th August. Florence C-L has been crowned champion of 2026 People's Choice Weakest Link!
• 7th August. Classic Game search now shows the format of the game.
• 8th August. Mr Dog will now always have a target for you, no matter how many rounds you've played lately. The target will be more accurate if you've played more, of course. [Discussion] [Discussion] [Discussion]
• 8th August. You can now control which messages appear in Public chat using the new cog menu on the top-right of the chat section.
• 9th August. After a fourteen-year holiday, Hardest Conundrum Attacks is back!
• 10th August. You can now toggle Fast Mode on and off from the in-game settings menu, rather than the account settings.
• 10th August. Monthly History now includes Game of the Week winners.
• 10th August. Jeremy Paxman is now available as a Dictionary Corner guest.
• 11th August. All on-hover text is now also available by clicking, when using mobile.
• 12th August. You can now use a wider set of accented characters and punctuation in name change requests, which should accommodate most real names and pseudonyms.
• 13th August. Junior Blitz is now a recognised high score format.
• 13th August. The main functionality and menus are now much easier to use on mobile.
• 14th August. Tourney games now announce the rules for handling ties.
• 14th August. Tourney rounds can now be set as "unrated" (excluding them from any impact on ratings or Pro Ranks).
• 15th August. Statland ranking for maxes across every Letters Attack format.
• 15th August. Eddington score tables now show the date each score was reached, and the game that reached the new score.
• 15th August. Various improvements to numbers usability, especially on mobile.
• 16th August. The Leaderboards page has been revamped and tidied up.
• 16th August. Comments on format pages are now associated with the specific section they're left on, rather than being common to all format sections.
• 16th August. Dictionary Corner now also shows almost-as-good words.
• 17th August. New Superstats section: Best Pro Rank wins.
• 17th August. Additional Superstats pages for maxes by day of week and hour of day.
• 17th August. Superstats KPI charts are now interactive, so you can drag a particular region to zoom in and mouseover each point to see the exact data. They also generally look a bit nicer.
• 17th August. You can now subscribe with Stripe, and there's now a single clean option (full subscription including Superstats). All for the same price.
• 18th August. You can now disable chat messages in the Public chat, using the settings cog in the top right of the chat panel.
• 18th August. Matthew Tevlin joined.
• 19th August. Conundrum buzzing revamp. Conundrum timing is now handled better even for laggier connections, so both players always get a fair chance to solve it. (Maybe now you can even beat Apterous Rex!)
• 19th August. Lord Alan Sugar is now available as a Dictionary Corner guest.
• 20th August. You can now retract your readiness for the next round if you misclick or your opponent doesn't respond.
• 21st August. A new readable summary of a player's tournament performances.
• 21st August. Redesigned tourney page.
• 22nd August. Thomas Carey has been crowned champion of 999!
• 22nd August. Florence C-L has been crowned champion of The Bigger The Better!
• 23rd August. Top Dog targets have been recalibrated and are now generally more accurate and fair for everyone.
• 25th August. Miss Piggy is now available as a guest.
• 25th August. The Countdown wiki has been updated the latest wiki version, and is now much more usable on mobile.
• 28th August. More balanced difficulty for conundrums, especially in non-English games.
• 31st August. The announcement for a max game now indicates if it's a player's first max game (or second, third, etc).
• 31st August. Unfinished Duel games now auto-complete at midnight.

Pro Ranks

The top three players at the end of the month:-

Monthly Top Scores

Only the month's 10 most popular formats are shown.

Game of the Week

Week	Winner
w/c 3 August 2026	Zohaib Rehan 134 - 124 Apterous Rex
w/c 10 August 2026	Stu Harkness 155 - 0 Apterous Prune
w/c 17 August 2026	Arthur P 156 - 154 Apterous Rex
w/c 24 August 2026	Ahmed M 895 - 889 Zohaib Rehan

Facts and Figures

This month, apterous gained 79 new users, taking us to 16,072 in total. A total of 385,538 rounds were played over 25,727 games, by 327 different players.

The Duel was won by Chris Hare with 3233 points from 31 games. Second was Matthew Brockwell with 3132 points from 31 games, and third Tom Cappleman with 3116 points from 30 games.