This is a great game which has provided me with hours of entertainment -- thank you for making it!
Here's some feedback about the new version:
Pros:
* New marking method: awesome! So much better than cycling through the numbers.
* Overall, I like that the game is more difficult now. In the previous version, if you don't have bad luck or screw up, you're pretty much guaranteed a perfect score every time. In this version this is more of a challenge. (Some of the difficulty is probably due to me not noticing some subtleties in the patterns; I just figured out something new while writing this comment. :) )
* New level 9 monsters -- yay! It makes guessing harder, and I like the pattern.
Neutral (not sure how I feel about these):
* Identical walls: I liked the unpredictability of the variable walls in the previous version, but maybe this didn't work as well with the adjusted stats.
* New gnome animation and sound: I don't love this, but it does make it clearer how the gnome works.
Cons:
* The board arbitrarily resizing to the window height: this causes the graphics to be antialiased / blurred, which does not flatter the pixel art, especially since different elements appear blurred to different degrees. When I resize my window to make the board smaller (the same size as the previous version), everything looks much better.
* The translucent chests and broken walls: I think this adds unnecessary visual clutter to the board.
* The board feels a lot more cramped now somehow; I'm not sure if it's the way the new crystal ball works, or the double walls, or one of the other changes. It kind of feels as if there are too many things going on for a board this size. It would be cool to be able to select between a few different board sizes and complexities with appropriately adjusted dragon health (e.g. a small board with only a small number and subset of monsters and a weak dragon, a medium board with more monsters and monster types, and a large board with everything -- that would follow the vibe of classic Minesweeper, where the three standard board sizes provide different styles of gameplay).
P. S. Will there be an updated download for the hotfixed new version?