City builders you can play in a phone browser

Why play in a browser instead of installing an app?

• Nothing to install, so nothing to uninstall when you stop. Trying a game costs you a tab.
• No app store account, no age gate, no permissions prompt, and no store review queue between the developer and a fix.
• The same URL is the same game on your phone, your work laptop and a borrowed computer, with the same progress.
• On a modest or older phone a browser game is often the one that runs, because it is not competing for storage with everything else you have installed.
• It survives you changing phones.

What usually breaks on a phone

Almost always one of five things, and all five are visible in the first minute if you know to look for them.

• Sign-in. Redirect-based logins are where mobile browser games fail most often, and you find out only after committing to the sign-up.
• Fixed-width layouts, which make the page scroll sideways. Once a page scrolls both ways, nothing on it is comfortable to use.
• Tap targets built for a mouse pointer. If two controls sit closer together than the width of a fingertip, you will hit the wrong one repeatedly.
• Inner panels with a fixed height, which clip their own content on a short screen with no way to scroll to what is missing.
• Hover states carrying real information. A tooltip that only appears on hover does not exist on a touchscreen, and sometimes that tooltip was the only place a cost or a cooldown was written.

A two-minute test before you sign up

• Open the site on your phone and turn the phone sideways, then back. A layout that survives both was built responsively rather than scaled down.
• Try to scroll the page horizontally. If it moves, the layout is not mobile-first, and every screen behind the sign-up will have the same problem.
• Find the smallest control on the page and tap it once with a thumb rather than a fingertip.
• Read the sign-in options before you use one. Sign in with Google or Apple on a phone is a single redirect that mobile browsers handle well.
• Check whether there is a public page with real content, such as leaderboards, that you can read without an account. If the signed-out experience was built at all, the signed-in one usually was too.

How Nandonia handles this

The browser is the only client. There is no app, on any platform, so the phone experience is not a reduced version of something else: it is the game, and it is built mobile-first as a project rule rather than as an afterthought.

• Single column at narrow widths, laid out down to a 320 pixel screen, which is narrower than any phone currently sold.
• No inner panel with a fixed height that can clip its own content, and no page that scrolls sideways.
• Sign in with Google or Apple, which is one redirect, or with a Solana wallet. No password to type on a phone keyboard and no email verification step.
• The leaderboards are readable without an account, so you can see the game is populated before you sign in.
• Nothing is real-time, so a dropped connection on mobile data costs you nothing.

The honest limitation: the world map is a rendered canvas, and on a several-year-old phone panning it is the heaviest thing the game does. Everything else is ordinary HTML and behaves like it.