I think I know the reason why the interface was updated. On small screens you can't resize it to fit. And I have no problem with the new interface. But why did they change the game engine? The old version used to kick my ass at level two. Now I beat level three every time. And when the position gets too complicated, it takes forever to move. Sometimes it will even freeze. It's not a distro issue because I've had the same experience on several different distros. I went to the Gnome games website and there are several bug reports on the freeze problem. But why did they take a perfectly good game and make it weaker and more buggy?

have you try it on different computers with different hardware? It might be at X.

Better use older versions. GNOME tends to make lots of things worse nowadays.