Cathedral Master Builder

Cathedral Master Builder puts you in charge of a 13th-century construction project: recruit workers for a bakery, smithy and masonry, buy iron and stone from a market whose prices move on their own, and finish a cathedral before the century runs out. It's a real simulation rather than a token jam concept — workers have individual stats and eventually age out and need replacing, resource output is tracked per building, and the market genuinely rewards patience over reflexive clicking. The competition's own record backs this up: several players independently reported finishing complete playthroughs, with specific dates ("Finally completed in 1305," "Completed construction in 1290") and detailed feedback about balance and pacing that only comes from actually playing a system through to its end.

Unreachable on a phone, confirmed at the exact mechanism

None of that content matters here, because the game's opening dialog — the very first thing a player sees — could not be dismissed by touch in any test run. This was diagnosed precisely rather than guessed at. The installed build has no <meta name="viewport"> tag anywhere in its HTML, so a phone browser falls back to treating it as an old desktop page: render it at a legacy fallback width, then shrink the whole rendered page down to fit the real screen (measured directly at roughly 34% scale on a 390-pixel-wide phone, with the canvas's own layout box reported at 1140 pixels wide). A live diagnostic listener confirmed exactly what that breaks: tapping the on-screen "OK" button at its correct visual location produced a real click event whose clientX/clientY came through in the shrunk, on-screen coordinate space, while the canvas element's own getBoundingClientRect() — what the game's own click logic uses to work out where on the canvas a tap landed — remained in the original, unshrunk 1140-pixel space. The canvas was measured starting 790 pixels down the page; the tap reported itself as landing at y=407. From the game's own point of view, every tap on this build's opening screen lands nowhere near the canvas at all. Repeated attempts — quick taps, and held presses up to 1.5 seconds — never once dismissed the dialog.

The same click, at the equivalent scaled position, dismissed the dialog instantly on desktop, where the browser has no reason to shrink anything and the coordinate spaces line up correctly. That confirms this is a phone-rendering defect specific to the missing viewport declaration, not a broken game underneath it — the desktop build behind this bug is the same complete, well-liked simulation the competition's judges rated respectably (46th of the field for controls, 81st for gameplay, with theme ranked a strong 22nd).

Final verdict

There's a genuinely solid tycoon game here, confirmed both by playing it on desktop and by reading through detailed, first-hand accounts of players finishing it during the original competition. But a shelf built around phone playability can't recommend a game whose very first screen cannot be dismissed by touch, for a reason as fixable and as clearly diagnosed as a missing viewport tag. Worth revisiting immediately if that one line gets added to the page; as shipped, it doesn't clear this shelf's most basic requirement.