Gold City is being worked on, and this is where that is written down. Every change a
player would notice, newest at the top, in the words I would use if you asked me in
person. If something on this list is not on your screen, reload the page.
The first turn. Most of the people who quit do it inside their first one, and until that is better there is not much point in me adding anything else.
Four pawns, and you can finally see them
The pawns you earn by finishing games used to be one piece in four colours. They are four different pieces now: a pin, a stack, a blade and a goblet. Seen from above at the distance the camera actually sits at, a silhouette reads where a colour does not.
The row of medallions on the front page draws those shapes instead of four identical grey blobs, so you can see what you are working towards before you have earned any of it. Tap one, earned or not, and it opens large with what it is and how many games are left.
The mountains had a hole in the top
From some angles a mountain or a cave showed a gap where its summit should be. The shape is built by fanning triangles up to its peaks, and with more than one peak that fan left an opening nothing was filling. It looked like three separate bugs and it was one.
Both are closed from every angle now, and the cave keeps its dark mouth.
A title screen, a tour, and something to come back for
The front page is a title screen now. The board is the screen rather than something dimmed behind a panel: it turns slowly in the middle, the name sits over it, and the way in is three cards for Easy, Medium and Hard with how long a game takes written on each. On a desktop the weekly board moved to the right of the stage, which is where a title screen puts a high score table.
There is a tutorial. Never played? Take the tour walks you through two turns on a fixed board: the two taps that move your pawn, why a machete will not get you down a river, what happens to the cards you played, and the one that catches everybody, which is that buying a card ends your movement for the turn. Seven steps, no clock, and it deals no real game, so leaving it costs you nothing.
Finishing a game now earns you a pawn. Ivory at one game, jade at two, obsidian at five, gold at ten. It is a cosmetic and it changes nothing about how the game plays. The count lives in your browser and is never sent anywhere, which is why there is still no account to make, and it is also why clearing your browser loses it. That is written on the front page next to the count rather than left for you to find out.
Caves and mountains stand up off the tiles. A mountain is a crag on the tile instead of a flat hex in a different colour, and a cave is that same crag with a dark mouth opened in the front of it, so you can read the ground without checking a key.
Six things that were wrong
Tapping the same thing twice used to give you an error about something you had not done. The second tap reached the server after the first had already moved the board, and the game answered the one that was now nonsense. Phones made this easy to hit, because a double tap is what you do when a tap looks like it did nothing. A repeated tap is ignored now instead of argued with.
Tapping a rubble pile or a base camp you were not actually able to use would walk you all the way through choosing which cards to spend, and then refuse. At a base camp the cards you choose leave the game permanently, so being taken through that choice when it was never going to be accepted was the worst one on this list. The board says why a space cannot be used now, before it asks you for anything.
The end screen counted every player's turn and put the total under the word Turns, so a game of twenty five rounds claimed a hundred and four. Nothing was miscalculated, the number was labelled as something it was not. It reads rounds, and it agrees with the leaderboard sitting underneath it.
The weekly board fills itself. It used to wait for somebody to visit the front page, and at this much traffic that meant a Wednesday board with two rows on it. Something runs every five minutes now and plays four games on the current week's map.
A weekly board nobody had reached yet showed twenty blank rows, which reads as a broken table rather than an early week. It says how many places are open instead.
And the summary panel on the front page did not say which rows were bots and which were people, while the full board one tap behind it did. Both say it.
The board reported its own tidying up as a failure
Finish a game, press Play again, and the fresh board would announce that it had lost its 3D view before it had drawn a single frame. The old board was being taken down after the new one had introduced itself, and the message belonged to the board that was leaving.
It reproduced on a desktop with a perfectly healthy graphics card, which is the part that matters: a good share of what looked like players hitting 3D trouble on this site was this, and it was mine rather than their hardware.
The weekly board is one ladder, twenty rows, no click
It used to be three ladders behind a tab, one per difficulty, which split a small field three ways and then hid all of it behind a tap. There is one board now. Everybody races the same map against the same three Unbeatable bots, twenty rows show on the front page without pressing anything, and the rest are one tap away.
The Weekly Race, and a browser that cannot do 3D gets a real answer
One board a week. Everybody gets the same map and the same three Unbeatable bots, and your score is the number of rounds you took to reach the Gold City. Fewest rounds wins. Tie on rounds and whoever cleared more blockades goes above, so cutting through the map beats walking around it.
Par is on the board as well, which is the computer playing the same map against itself. Beat par and you have beaten the machine on its own ground.
Put a name on it or leave the box empty and post as Anonymous. The name is kept in your browser and nowhere else, so there is no account and nothing to sign up for. On Monday it resets and there is a new map.
Separately, that same day: if your browser could not do WebGL you got a box saying "Something broke" and a Reload button that put you back in front of the same box. Now it says what the game needs and what usually fixes it, and the rest of the screen keeps working. If it happens mid-game there is still a real game on the server and a way back to it.
A translated game is finishable
If you had Chrome's automatic translation switched on, the game crashed. On your first action, then again when the turn changed hands, and then a third time when you confirmed a purchase, which is the single most common thing anybody does in this game. Three different mechanisms, one cause: the translator swaps out the text the page is holding on to, and the page then goes looking for text that is no longer there. A translated game plays through now.
One thing this did not fix, and you should hear it from me rather than find it yourself. Under translation, a number that changes in place can freeze. The count on a button will read one thing while the button itself behaves correctly. If that is biting you, turning translation off for this site is the fix today.
Also that day: the board stopped offering moves it was going to refuse. Once you have bought a card your movement is over for the turn, and the board had gone on lighting up spaces as though it were not.
This log starts on 21 August 2026, which is the week the game met its first players who were not me.
Gold City is an independent game inspired by The Quest for El Dorado. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by Ravensburger or Reiner Knizia.