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v0.66.02026-09-06

The Philippines, in fifty-one crossings

  • A forty-eighth board. Forty-three towns from Laoag in the north to General Santos in the south, across Luzon, Mindoro, Palawan, the Visayas and Mindanao. It is the first board where the sea does most of the work: ten of the fifty-one connections are ferry crossings, more than any other board, and the route from Legazpi to Cebu goes by way of the San Bernardino Strait exactly as the roll-on ferries do.
  • Each town carries its own mark on the map: the belfry sinking into the dunes at Laoag, the milkfish pens of Dagupan, the stone terraces above Banaue, the perfect cone at Legazpi, the piña loom, the Santo Niño, the San Juanico bridge, the striped sail of a vinta. Twenty-eight painted scenes stand behind them, and a hundred questions.
  • The spirit of this board is the Tikbalang — horse-headed, too tall, knees above its shoulders when it sits on a wall — who walks travellers in circles all night for the fun of it. You get away by turning your shirt inside out, which is what the offering is. It is a prankster, not a monster, and it is drawn as one.
v0.65.02026-09-04

The atlas grew its railways

  • The towns in the atlas were floating loose; now they are joined. Rail lines run between them with their sleepers drawn in, and sea routes cross the water as pale dashes — the ferry to Sado, the long hop out to Hachijōjima. There are 2,599 of them across the 47 boards, 283 of which are crossings by sea.
  • The land filled in too. The mountains, torii gates, woods and lakes that the boards are drawn with now appear in the atlas as well, so a country looks like itself instead of a flat green shape. Zoomed into Japan the map went from 117 drawn shapes to 560 — near enough the board you actually play on.
  • One town was invisible until now. Apia sits at longitude 188, past the point where the map wraps, so it was pinned somewhere no amount of scrolling could reach — it had never once appeared. It does now, with its sea routes running to it and stopping cleanly at the map’s edge instead of streaking across the world.
v0.64.02026-09-04

A world atlas you can wander

  • There is a new page: one map of the whole world that you can drag and zoom, the way you would any map. Pull back and the whole globe fits. Lean in and the boards appear, then their coastlines, then the towns on them. It is under “Atlas” at the foot of every page — you do not have to be in a game to open it.
  • Tap a town and it tells you about itself — its picture, its one line, and the few sentences behind it. Sapporo was laid out on a grid in 1869 with American advisers, unlike any older Japanese city. Ōarai has a torii standing in the waves. There are 2,218 towns across 47 boards, and every one of them has something to say.
  • And it shows you the holes. Land with a board of its own is gold; land with none is hatched and dark. Africa, the Middle East and the Arctic go dark — about a quarter of the world’s land has no board of its own yet. It is an honest picture of how far this has got, and of where it could go next.
v0.63.02026-09-03

The map tells you what each town is for

  • The Ibaraki board had thirty-six towns sharing fourteen symbols. Ōarai and any other shrine town wore the same little mark, so the map could tell you a name but never what the place was known for. Every town now has its own: a torii standing in the waves at Ōarai, a kiln jar at Kasama, four hectares of sunflowers at Naka, a melon at Hokota, the tall chimney at Hitachi, a bride’s boat at Itako.
  • The symbols also grow as you lean in. They used to be a fixed size on the board, which meant they were smallest exactly where towns crowd together and you most wanted to read them. Now they follow the zoom, up to half again as large. Pulled all the way out to the whole map, they go back to being dots — at that distance the towns sit fourteen pixels apart, and a readable picture would only have swallowed the names.
  • And the towns that matter right now say a word about themselves. The destination, the town you are standing in, and the towns you could stop at this turn carry a short line — “A torii gate standing in the waves”, “Four hectares of sunflowers” — placed only where it will not push a name off the map. At most five at a time, so the map stays a map.
v0.62.02026-09-03

Arriving is the moment now

  • Reaching the destination now takes over the whole screen — the town you reached, who reached it, and the prize, with a halo and confetti. A first arrival gets more of everything. It happens whoever arrives, so you will never again learn about someone else’s big moment from the log afterwards. Tap anywhere to move on.
  • The finish is worth reaching. The standings now show the placing, each traveller’s colour, their cash and businesses separately, and the towns they took whole — with first place given its own card. The award ceremony hands out its prizes with the winners’ colours beside their names.
  • If you said you are new here, the first few turns talk to you. One line at a time, in the corner, never in your way: press the die; pick the lit square with the smaller number; and when you first stop in a town, what buying a business actually does. You can dismiss it for good with one tap.
  • Items that carry you now let you choose where to land. A plane ticket used to fling you 8–12 squares somewhere random — once, it cost ¥2,400,000 and moved the destination one square closer. Now the reachable squares light up with their distance-to-destination on them, and you pick. The distance is still luck; where you step off is not.
  • The keyboard works properly. Space rolls the die and advances the cards, the arrow keys move between the lit squares, and Enter picks one — from anywhere on the page, without hunting for the button first. A small note says so once, the first time you can roll. Pass-and-play around one laptop just got easier.
  • And the buttons say what they are. The map button at the corner of the board now reads “Whole map” and shows whether it is on or off; the music note says whether music is on; the compass says north is up. Hover, focus, or hold your finger on any of them. In the last two months of the journey, the music quickens — the same tune of the land you are in, but restless.
v0.61.02026-09-03

You can see what just happened

  • The big moments now stop the game and show themselves, whoever they happen to. Someone reaching the destination, the next destination being drawn, the spirit changing shoulders, a town falling to one owner — you used to find these out afterwards by reading the travel log, if you read it at all. Now they play out in front of you, and you can tap to move on.
  • The spirit now explains itself. When it climbs onto someone it says why (it goes to whoever is farthest from the destination) and how to get rid of it (get ahead of someone, or pay with an offering). Every misfortune card now states what it actually did — the exact amount, the turn you lose, the business you lost by name. And in your first year, if you have said you are new here, it will not strike you three turns in a row.
  • Money no longer changes without a reason you can see. Every three months a settlement card shows what each traveller earned, side by side. The destination prize says out loud that it grows every month it goes unclaimed. And the calendar now sits above your turn panel: which month it is, and how many are left.
  • The board is easier to read. After a roll, each square you can reach carries a small number: how far the destination will still be if you stop there. A faint gold trail shows the shortest way to the destination. Your own train is drawn a size larger with a coloured ring, so you can find yourself at a glance. The camera glides between turns instead of jumping.
  • And the little answers are back. The die no longer sits on the map after it has stopped — it shrinks into the die button, out of the way of the squares you are choosing. Stopping on an empty square now gets a whistle, a small bounce, and a line from the window telling you where you are. Buying a business raises a banner and lets you see the town turn your colour; selling one asks twice, and never right after you bought it.
  • Choosing where to ride was quietly misleading, and is not any more. Opening a new region now clears the board you had picked, so you never set off somewhere you did not choose. Boards inside a country (Japan has five) are listed beside the map instead of piling their names on top of each other. And if a journey is already saved, setting off asks first.
v0.60.02026-08-28

A tidier address

  • The game now lives at t29mato.github.io/world-express/. It has always called itself World Express on screen; the address said something else, and that has been quietly confusing for a while. Both now say the same thing.
  • If you kept the old address, it will send you here on its own. If you added the game to your home screen from the old address, opening it once while online moves it across and clears out what it had stored; after that it works offline again as before.
  • Your saved games are untouched. They live in your browser under a name that has not changed, so a game left half-finished is still waiting where you left it.
v0.59.02026-08-26

Put it on your home screen

  • You can now keep World Express on your phone's home screen. Open it in Safari or Chrome, tap the share button, and choose “Add to Home Screen”. It gets its own icon and opens without an address bar or tabs — just the game. Nothing comes from an app store, and no account is needed.
  • It also runs without a connection. The game keeps itself on your device, so it opens on a train, on a plane, or anywhere the signal drops. Boards you have opened before stay playable; a board you have never opened still needs a connection the first time.
  • And when a new version arrives, the game tells you. A small note appears at the bottom with an Update button; press it and the new version loads. It never swaps itself while you are playing, and your journey is saved before it reloads.
v0.58.02026-08-25

Four ways to know a country

  • “New here” no longer hides two of the three answers. Hiding them made an easy question into a coin toss: get it right and you learned nothing, get it wrong and it just felt unfair. Everyone now sees all three answers, whatever they picked. What changes instead is the questions themselves — pick “New here” and you get the well-known things, the ones with a large hint inside them.
  • And there is a fourth step now. “A little” and “Very well” were far apart, and anyone in between had to round themselves off in one direction or the other. “Quite well” sits between them. The reward still tilts the same way it always did: the less you claim to know, the more a right answer is worth, and the less a wrong one costs.
v0.57.02026-08-25

A new home

  • The game has moved to t29mato.github.io/grand-express/. That is now the address to bookmark and to share. The old one still works, so nothing you have saved is lost — saved games live in your own browser and are not affected by the move at all.
  • The feedback form now hands your words straight to GitHub instead of passing them through us. Press Send and a GitHub page opens with everything already filled in; press the button there and it becomes a public ticket you can follow. Nothing else about it changes — it was always a public ticket.
v0.56.02026-08-21

Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Cuba

  • Argentina, where the railways were never built to join the country together. Every line was laid by a rival foreign company to carry the wealth of the pampas to the port of Buenos Aires, and the fan shape they left is still the shape of the country. Retiro station is really three separate stations, built side by side between 1915 and 1930 by companies that competed with each other; two are broad gauge and one is metre gauge, and they have never shared a platform. Nationalising the lot in 1948 made them one company but did not make the gauges match. At Ingeniero Jacobacci freight had to be lifted from one train to another, wagon by wagon.
  • Chile, a country 4,300 kilometres long and never more than about 350 wide — the thinnest board in the game. The railways stop twice, for two different reasons. In the north a Bolivian tax on a Chilean nitrate railway company, ten centavos a quintal, ended in Chilean troops landing at Antofagasta on the very day the company's assets were to be auctioned; the war that followed redrew three countries' coastlines. Then artificial nitrogen made the whole industry pointless and the desert kept the empty towns. In the south the line simply ends at Puerto Montt, because beyond it there are only fjords. Puerto Edén, two hundred people, can still only be reached by boat.
  • Colombia, where the river was the road first. Three ranges of the Andes run side by side, so the railways never became one trunk line — they stayed short branches carrying cargo to the Magdalena, around the rapids at Honda, around the sandbar at the river mouth. Puerto Colombia's pier, opened in 1893, was once the longest in the world; it fell silent when engineers cut a channel through the bar in the 1930s. And when SCADTA began flying in 1920 there were not enough runways, so the aeroplanes were seaplanes and they landed on the Magdalena. The river was the road, and then it was the runway.
  • Cuba had a railway eleven years before Spain did. The line from Havana to Bejucal opened on 19 November 1837 — Barcelona to Mataró did not open until 1848. It was not the crown that paid for it but the sugar and tobacco merchants of Havana, and in 1832 the planters themselves had petitioned for a road from Güines to the port. It was laid for sugar, not for people. A report from 1837 complains that the works could not hire enough hands: at harvest the cane fields paid better than the railway. The only line the colonial government built itself was military, and it was laid, like the sugar lines, by enslaved people and indentured labourers.
  • Forty-seven boards now, with 2,218 towns and 3,849 questions.
v0.55.02026-08-21

Oceania

  • Oceania. Fifty-one of the fifty-four routes are sea crossings; only three run on land. The railway barely reached this continent, and where it did, each line was laid for a single cargo. Lautoka's 610mm network — some 600 kilometres of it — has never carried a passenger. Yaren's phosphate line stopped once four fifths of the island's surface had been dug away. At Lae no road or railway ever crossed the mountains to the goldfields, so from 1927 the dredges were taken apart and flown in; for a few years in the early 1930s that grass strip is said to have handled more freight by weight than any airport on Earth.
  • The rising sea is not drawn as something in the future. Funafuti's highest point is 4.6 metres above the water and Majuro averages two; both already flood at every spring tide. The board draws the water at the foot of houses on stilts. Bikini and Mururoa appear not as explosions but as wire fences, warning signs and a concrete dome over the waste — because the subject is that eighty years on, nobody can go back. The spirit of this board is called The Ship That Has Not Come, and it is never shown: only an empty horizon through a window.
  • That completes the six continent-wide boards: Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America and Oceania. Forty-three boards now, with 2,036 towns and 3,460 questions.
v0.54.02026-08-20

Hokkaidō and Kyūshū

  • Hokkaidō, where the railways were laid for coal and are now being closed by depopulation. The Yūbari branch went in 2019; the whole Rumoi line in 2023. Seven of the forty towns sit on lines that no longer exist, and the board draws them with buffer stops rather than ruins — people still live there. Shiraoi carries a law that stood from 1899 until 1997. Matsumae and Esashi are older than the settlement of the island: they were trading ports before the surveyors arrived.
  • Kyūshū, the only window Japan kept open for two hundred years. Hirado had a trading post decades before Dejima, and in 1641 the shogunate made the Dutch tear down a new warehouse because the Christian date was carved on it — then moved them to Nagasaki. At Urakami the cathedral of 1925 was directly under the second atomic bomb; the city demolished what was left in 1958 and rebuilt on the same spot, and the argument about that has not ended. Forty towns, and next to the crater at Sakurajima the board draws not a disaster but a routine: yellow ash bags at the collection point, children in helmets.
  • Forty-two boards now, with 1,985 towns and 3,359 questions.
v0.53.02026-08-20

South Africa and Norway complete the six

  • South Africa, where the railway carried people every day between the place the law let them live and the place it let them work. Soweto is an administrative abbreviation — South Western Townships — and its commuter line was laid to move workers who were not allowed to live in the city. At Carletonville the gold is four kilometres down and the rock is sixty degrees. Kimberley invented the closed compound in the 1880s, and the gold mines copied it. Forty-one towns across all nine provinces, and the rest of the board is wine, whales, rock art and the flowers of Namaqualand.
  • Norway, where the railway thins as it goes north and stops at Bodø. Beyond it there is no line at all — Tromsø, Alta, Kirkenes have never had one, and on this board the north is joined by sea. Narvik has a railway, but it runs east into Sweden and was never connected to Norway's own network. Stavanger sent fifty-two emigrants on a sloop in 1825 and eight hundred thousand more over the next century, out of a country of barely two million, and then oil was found in 1969. Forty-eight towns.
  • Forty boards now, with 1,905 towns and 3,157 questions. This finishes the second wave: Egypt, Peru, Vietnam, Switzerland, South Africa, Norway.
v0.52.02026-08-20

Vietnam and Switzerland

  • Vietnam, where the line was finished before the country was. The Reunification Express ran the length of the coast from 1936; the partition cut it in 1954; it was joined again twenty months after the war ended. Forty-three towns. At Hanoi the truss bridge of 1902 was bombed again and again and never replaced — only patched, and the board draws the patched spans in a different colour. At the old dividing line the picture shows no weapons, only a bicycle crossing.
  • Switzerland, where neutrality meant turning the country into a fortress. For most of the twentieth century the Gotthard tunnels and bridges were kept wired with demolition charges. In July 1940 General Guisan gathered every officer at the Rütli — the meadow of the founding legend — and told them the army would fall back into the Alps and blow every road behind it. At Chiasso the border sent refugees back for being Jewish while staying open to gold traded with Germany. Forty-four towns, four languages, and a constitution that never once calls Bern the capital.
  • Thirty-eight boards now, with 1,816 towns and 2,956 questions.
v0.51.02026-08-20

Peru, where the railway climbed higher than the body can

  • The Central Railway crosses the Andes at over 4,700 metres. It was not built to carry people — it was built to bring ore down from Cerro de Pasco and La Oroya to the port, and the tourist trains that use it today still carry oxygen for passengers who faint. Forty-six towns, from a coast that almost never rains to an Amazon city no road has ever reached.
  • Cerro de Pasco began by digging up its own cemetery. Puno has an iron ship carried over the Andes in more than two thousand pieces on the backs of mules, and fired at first with llama dung. Iquitos has rubber-boom mansions and, a river away, a 1912 British consular report that called what was happening there slavery. Ayacucho's card says plainly that a war which killed tens of thousands was fought mostly there.
  • Thirty-six boards now, with 1,729 towns and 2,751 questions.
v0.50.12026-08-20

Two dates on the Egypt board were wrong

  • A question said the Ras El Hekma investment agreement was announced in March 2024; it was signed on 23 February. Another said Ethiopia laid the foundation stone of its dam days after Mubarak resigned; it was closer to seven weeks — 11 February to 2 April 2011. Both answers were right and only the dates around them were wrong, which is the shape almost every error we have found takes.
v0.50.02026-08-20

Egypt, where the map is the population

  • Almost all of Egypt is empty desert, and almost everyone lives along one river and its delta. You can see it on the board: forty-one towns strung along a thin green ribbon, with nothing on either side. There are no pyramids and no pharaohs anywhere on this board — not in a town, not in a question, not in a picture. Egypt is a place where people live now.
  • The Aswan High Dam drowned people before it drowned monuments: more than fifty thousand Egyptian Nubians left villages their families had lived in for generations. At Luxor the same argument runs the other way — three thousand families were moved off the west bank between 2006 and 2009 because they were living on top of the tombs. Alexandria has the oldest tram in Africa, running since 1860, in a city that is slowly sinking. Rosetta is a town named after a stone that has spent two centuries in another country's museum.
  • Thirty-five boards now, with 1,683 towns and 2,650 questions.
v0.49.02026-08-19

Africa, the fifth continent board

  • Sixty-three towns from Alexandria to Cape Town, and one thing they keep saying: these railways were built to carry things out, not to carry people across. Kinshasa and Brazzaville are the two closest capitals on earth and there is no bridge between them. Kigali has no railway at all. Banjul sits on the only country the river served instead of a railway. Nouadhibou has a line laid for a single train, two and a half kilometres of iron ore. At Oran a border station has been waiting thirty years for a train that has not come.
  • The Cape-to-Cairo railway was never finished, and the board lets you see where it stopped. Aswan is the end of the line going south; Cape Town is the start going north; Bulawayo is where every direction of that plan met. The gaps in between are the point. A hundred and three questions, and a spirit of misfortune drawn from the same idea: the Unfinished Line, who rides with whoever falls behind.
  • Thirty-four boards now, with 1,642 towns and 2,548 questions.
v0.48.02026-08-19

Mexico, Spain and New Zealand

  • Mexico, where the passenger trains mostly stopped. The network was broken up and sold in the 1990s and the scheduled services went with it; what survives is freight, the Copper Canyon line through thirty-seven bridges and eighty-six tunnels, and the new Maya Train, which the board describes together with the objections to it. Forty-five towns, from Teotihuacán — whose builders are still unknown, and whose Avenue of the Dead was named centuries later by Aztecs who assumed the mounds were tombs — to Aguascalientes, where the railway workshops opened in 1884.
  • Spain, where the trains change gauge at the border. The Iberian gauge of 1,668mm does not meet Europe's 1,435mm, so for over a century crossing into France meant changing trains — and now the high-speed lines run on standard gauge, so two gauges run side by side inside the same country. Bilbao adds a third: the metre-gauge lines British capital laid to move iron ore. Forty-five towns across eight regions, and four official languages, one of which — Basque — is related to no other language on earth.
  • New Zealand, where the railway crosses the sea. Wagons roll onto the ferry at Picton and off again at Wellington, because the two islands have no bridge. Forty-three towns: the geothermal field at Rotorua, the coast at Kaikōura that rose six metres in the 2016 earthquake and cut the line for over a year, Te Anau where a bird declared extinct in 1898 turned up alive in 1948. Wellington became the capital in 1864 because the colonies could not agree, and three commissioners were brought over from Australia to decide for them.
v0.47.02026-08-19

Towns you already know get out of the way

  • The first time you stop in a town you get the picture, the name and the line about what the place is. The fourth time you stop in the same town, you got all of it again — the same picture, the same line — before you could get to the part you actually stopped for. Now a town you have already visited opens straight onto your cash, the businesses and the stall. The picture is not gone: there is a button under the name that brings it back, for when you skipped past it the first time.
  • Arriving at your destination is left alone — that is the biggest moment in the game and not somewhere to save time. Whether a town counts as visited is tracked per traveler, so a town that is old news to you may still be new to the player next to you. Saved games from before this change treat every town as new again, once.
v0.46.22026-08-17

The whole-continent boards were hiding

  • Open Asia on the map and you get Japan, Korea, China, India and the rest — and under them a thin bar reading "Asia". That bar was the whole-continent board, sixty-five towns from Istanbul to Vladivostok, but it looked like a heading. Someone told us there was no Asia board at all. It had been there since v0.43.0. The bar now says what it is and carries the board's description, like every other choice. The same applies to Europe, North America and South America.
v0.46.12026-08-17

We now count visits

  • We had no idea whether anyone was playing, or which boards they picked. The game now counts page views so we can tell. It does not set a cookie, does not follow you between sites, and does not collect anything that identifies you — we chose a counter that works without any of that, rather than the usual one, precisely so there is no consent banner to click past. Nothing about how the game plays has changed.
v0.46.02026-08-17

A quiet run out of the station

  • The opening of a game was the busiest part of it. Not because more was packed in — we measured, and the squares near the start carry the same mix as the rest of the board — but because everything there is new. Every town is a town you have not read yet, you have no items, and you have no money behind you. Three squares in and you had already been stopped four times. Now the squares around your departure town are mostly plain: roughly seven in ten of the events near the start have been taken out, so you can get moving before the map starts asking you things.
  • Towns were left alone. Buying businesses is the game, and the towns near the start are where you build the position you spend the rest of the year defending. The quiet stretch also fades rather than ending abruptly — the further you get from home, the more the board wakes up. And a few events are always kept near the start, so the first quiz never sits more than a short ride away.
v0.45.12026-08-15

The phone screen fits again

  • On a phone, everything below the map was off the screen. The destination you are racing to, your items, the other travelers, how many squares are left — all of it needed scrolling, and the page itself ran 326 to 389 pixels past the bottom. You could roll the die, but you could not see where you were going or use what you were carrying. Now it all fits on one screen at once, on a 375-wide phone as well as a 390-wide one.
  • Getting there meant giving up some things on small screens: the header no longer shows the app name, the destination card hides its artwork, and the travel log is folded away. The most recent line of the log still appears at the top of the screen when something happens, so nothing is lost. On a tablet or a computer, nothing has changed.
v0.45.02026-08-15

Room to breathe

  • Every square used to do something. Land anywhere between two towns and a window opened — a quiz, a windfall, a setback — and the board disappeared behind it until you closed it. Across all thirty boards that was 3,466 squares, every one of them an interruption. Now about half of them are plain: you stop, nothing happens, and the next traveler rolls. The rail journey has some quiet stretches in it again.
  • Quiz squares are now about a quarter of the run between towns rather than half. You will still meet plenty of questions — a board has hundreds of squares and one game touches only a few of them — but they no longer arrive on every single stop. The legend under "What the squares do" lists the plain square alongside the others.
v0.44.02026-08-14

Harder questions, and more of them

  • You told us the quiz repeats itself the more you play. We measured, and the cause was not the number of questions — it was where they sat. Say you know a place well and the game draws from its hardest tier, and some boards had almost nothing there: Europe had fifty questions and not one above difficulty six. Ten boards have now been rebuilt to a hundred or more each, weighted to the hard end. Japan went from thirty-two questions to a hundred and nine, the Solar System from thirty-two to a hundred and one, Korea from thirty-seven to a hundred and two.
  • The new questions go where the town cards do not. Ainu place names read as sentences about the land — Niseko-Annupuri says where it stands. Four railway gauges collide across Asia, and none of them is an accident. Ceuta and Tetouan were joined by a metre-gauge line that could never meet the standard-gauge track in the French zone, because the two protectorates built separately. Britain's one double-deck train was abandoned not for lack of demand but because the ceilings were too low to board quickly.
  • Along the way we found questions whose answers were already printed on the town card you had just read, and a few that were simply wrong — Sedna was called a dwarf planet, which it is not, and Japan's record gust was dated to the wrong typhoon. Those are fixed. Twenty boards are still waiting their turn.
v0.43.02026-08-14

Asia, and harder questions

  • Asia completes the four continents: sixty-five towns across thirty-five countries, from Istanbul to Vladivostok and from Irkutsk to Java. The Silk Road was a net, not a road. Coaches change their bogies at Dostyk and at Naushki because the gauge changes at the border. Busan has no railway to the mainland at all. At Kanchanaburi the board says plainly that far more rōmusha died on the Burma Railway than Allied prisoners, and that their names were not kept.
  • Quizzes were repeating for anyone who played a board more than once. The cause was not the number of questions but their spread: pick "I know this place well" and the game draws from the hardest tier, and some boards had almost nothing there — Europe had fifty questions and not one above difficulty six. Europe, South America and North America now carry a hundred or more each, with the new ones weighted to the hard end. The other boards follow.
  • Typing a player's name used to rebuild 235KB of map artwork on every keystroke, even on screens where none of it is visible. It does not any more.
v0.42.02026-08-14

Three continents you can ride end to end

  • Europe, South America and North America each fit onto a single board. These are not the country boards zoomed out — they carry the stories that only cross a border: the coaches lifted one by one at Brest to change their bogies for Russian gauge, the Pan-American Highway stopping dead at the Darién Gap, the Trans-Andine that cut thirty-six hours off the voyage around Cape Horn, the harbour at Punta Arenas that emptied overnight when the Panama Canal opened.
  • The same river changes its name at the border, and so does the board: it reads Rio Grande in English and Río Bravo del Norte in Spanish. Iceland has never had a railway. Kathmandu is a capital with no station. Not one of these is a country's own story.
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a square you can land on and buy. It is written into Kraków's card as fact, the way Hiroshima has always been written on the Japan board, and what you can buy there has nothing to do with it.
v0.41.12026-08-14

A steam engine was running between the planets

  • On the Solar System board your piece is now a probe with solar panels and a dish, not a steam locomotive. The water texture has been taken out of space as well.
v0.41.02026-08-14

Two boards that are not countries: the Solar System and Japan's Hundred Mountains

  • The Solar System board treats space as the sea and each body as an island, so the line between planets is a ship's route — a probe's trajectory. Forty bodies from the Sun to the Oort Cloud, spaced by the logarithm of their distance, because at true scale the inner planets collapse into a single dot. The Oort Cloud does not fit even so, and the board says so.
  • The Hundred Mountains board turns Fukada Kyūya's hundred peaks into a hundred stops. A third of them crowd into the Japan Alps, close enough that the map cannot name them all at once — but the ridge lines between them are real, and so is the gap: not one of the hundred stands in western Honshū, so no train can round the Inland Sea.
  • The board picker now has a button under the map for boards that cannot be pinned to a place on Earth, and the Americas are split into North and South.
v0.40.02026-08-13

Five more boards: Brazil, Venezuela, Australia, Canada, Ukraine

  • Twenty-four boards now, with one thousand and eighty-three towns and nine hundred and thirty-four questions. Ride the Indian Pacific across the Nullarbor, follow the line the Canadian Pacific was built to make a country, cross Brazil where the railways mostly went quiet, take the ferry to Margarita Island, and travel a Ukraine that keeps its timetable.
  • Each board keeps its own money, music, items, spirit of misfortune, and twelve months of weather and festivals. Venezuela prices its property in US dollars, because that is how homes there are actually bought. Ukraine's board leaves the occupied and shelled towns off the route, and draws Crimea as the land it is recognised to be.
  • Twenty city backgrounds that had a see-through gap between sky and ground — most of them in Indonesia — have been repaired.
v0.39.02026-08-13

Pick a region, then a board

  • The map now asks for a region first. Tap Asia, Europe, Africa or the Americas and the map moves in, writing each board's name across its own country — tap the name to ride there. With nineteen boards on one world map the marks were closer together than a fingertip; a region at a time leaves room to read them.
  • Boards that live inside another board now have their own step. Tapping Japan moves in to Japan's own map, where Japan and Ibaraki sit side by side — the same for Indonesia and Bali. Around the World keeps its button under the map, because a whole planet cannot be pointed at with one mark.
v0.38.02026-08-13

Pick your board from the world map

  • The board list is now a world map. Every board sits where it belongs, so you can see that Bali is a dot beside Java and that Russia stretches across a third of the map. Tap a mark to choose it; the whole-world board has its own button under the map.
  • Marks that would overlap are nudged apart, with a thin line back to the true spot. Filter by region and the names appear beside each mark. On a phone the map is too small to tap accurately, so the card list is used there instead.
v0.37.02026-08-13

Nineteen boards

  • Seven new boards join the twelve: Russia along the Trans-Siberian, the United States coast to coast, Indonesia across seventeen thousand islands, Morocco from the Atlantic to the dunes, Ghana from the forts to the northern savanna, Bali on its own, and Malaysia across the South China Sea. Eight hundred and eighty-two towns, one thousand one hundred and twenty-two lines, seven hundred and fifty-six questions.
  • Each board keeps its own money, music, items, spirit of misfortune, and twelve months of weather and festivals. A ferry crosses Lake Volta where the old town lies under the water. The Trans-Siberian runs its real stops. Kete Krachi, Salerno, Purwokerto and Jerada were added because a line was crossing water it should not — and each turned out to have a story worth the stop.
v0.36.02026-08-12

The game is now called World Express

  • It began on the Bolivian altiplano and carried that name for a while. There are twelve boards now, on five continents, and the old name only described the first one. The new name says what the game is.
v0.35.02026-08-12

Five more boards: Turkey, Germany, China, the United Kingdom and Italy

  • Two hundred and twenty-six towns, joined by two hundred and ninety-eight lines, with two hundred and thirteen new questions between them. Istanbul to Kars on the eastern express, Beijing to Lhasa on the line that climbs the plateau, Sylt and Rügen by the causeways the trains actually cross, Holyhead to Belfast by ferry, and ships from Naples and Genoa to Sicily and Sardinia.
  • Each board keeps its own music, its own nine items, its own spirit of misfortune and its own twelve months of weather and festivals — Chungcheong takes the slowest tempo in Korea, the Karakoncolos walks the cold nights of February in Turkey, and the Monacello of Naples pays you back in treasure if you steal his red cap.
  • Where a map cuts a name off at the edge of the board, the name now moves to where it fits — Kashgar had been showing as “ashgar”, and Çeşme as “eşme”.
v0.34.02026-08-12

A new board: Korea

  • Forty towns from Seoul down to Seogwipo, joined by fifty-five lines along the KTX routes, with ships out to Jeju and to Ulleungdo in the East Sea. Thirty-seven questions, nineteen things that can happen when you stop, and music that follows the regional modes rather than the Japanese scales — the slowest tempo of the six regions belongs to Chungcheong, which has a long-standing reputation for taking its time.
  • With more boards to choose from, the picker now filters by region and the cards are smaller, so the travellers and house rules no longer get pushed off the screen. Each card carries a tag for how much ground it covers — a whole world, a country, or somewhere closer in.
v0.33.02026-08-12

Four ships now sail where ships can sail

  • The last of the crossings that ran overland have been re-routed to ports that face the right sea. Marrakesh now sails to Lisbon rather than Barcelona, which had meant crossing Spain; Cairo meets Athens rather than Rome; Singapore meets Kolkata across the Bay of Bengal; and the run up to Dwarka starts from Goa, since no route from Mumbai could get round the Kathiawar peninsula.
  • Seven crossings are kept as they are, each with its reason written down: the train under the Tsugaru Strait, the railway down the Malay peninsula, and five long ocean routes that merely graze a cape — real ships pass the same way. They are listed separately from the faults now, so the next person to look does not undo a decision that was already made.
v0.32.02026-08-12

Ships have stopped sailing over land

  • On the world map, twenty-five shipping lines ran across dry land — one sailed the whole width of Angola, another straight over Spain. Sixteen of them are fixed. Most only needed the bend in the line moved to the other end; two were never sea voyages at all and are now railways, including the run from Kolkata to Bangkok, which had been sailing over Myanmar.
  • Japan and India had the same trouble in the other direction, with lines drawn out to sea. Those are fixed too. A few crossings are left alone on purpose: the train between Hakodate and Aomori really does run under the strait, and the line down the Malay peninsula really is a railway — there the coastline is what is coarse, not the route.
v0.31.02026-08-11

You can cross the Pacific at last

  • To get from Tokyo to San Francisco you had to sail the other way round the world, through Europe and the Atlantic. A ship now runs from Suva to Papeete, and the crossing takes twenty-four squares instead of the long way about.
  • The world map is cut at the date line, so the Pacific sits split between the two edges of the board. The new route is drawn the way a globe would have it: the line leaves the eastern edge and comes back in from the west, with the far port named at each end, and your train crosses in a single step instead of sliding back across Africa.
v0.30.02026-08-11

The spirit rides with you now

  • El Tío, the Binbōgami, the Flying Dutchman — whichever spirit your board keeps, it only ever showed up as a mark beside a name in the traveller list. Now it rides on the roof of the train it has chosen, and you can see across the map who is carrying it. Its ring is in that traveller's colour, so there is no mistaking whose luck is about to turn.
  • Two towns close together were joined by a bare line with nothing between them, and a single roll could carry you across three of them. Around the world, thirty-six of the ninety-six lines were like that, and you could shuttle between Amsterdam and Paris to burn off a roll. Every line has at least one square again.
v0.29.02026-08-11

You are buying property now, not souvenirs

  • A journey used to start with about the price of a good camera. It now starts with twelve million yen in Japan — the sort of money that buys a building, which is what the town shops were always selling. Every board is scaled to match; the play itself is unchanged.
  • Some boards had nothing worth saving up for: on Ibaraki the dearest business cost barely more than the cheapest. Each board now has something that takes a year to afford — the space centre at Tsukuba, the lithium works on the Uyuni salt flat — and every business returns the same rate, so a big one costs more without paying better.
  • A roll of one could light up squares that looked two apart. The board was right — but a square on a short line was drawn a tenth of the length of a square on a long one, so the eye was being told something the rules did not mean. Spacing is now even.
  • Saving mid-game could leave the other travellers frozen: the “saved” notice closed over whatever was open, and some of those windows were what set the next turn going. Saving no longer interrupts anything.
  • Each computer traveller has its own strength now, so you can face a gentle one and a merciless one in the same game. And the round-the-world map has weather in it — taiga, desert, tropics — with the oceans and regions named.
v0.28.02026-08-11

Nothing is thrown away without asking, and other people's turns stop asking you

  • Discarding a saved journey used to wipe it on the spot. A year of play could go in one misclick. It now shows you what is about to be lost and asks first, with “keep” as the default.
  • A right answer is gold now, a wrong one stays red. They used to be the same colour, told apart only by the shape of the mark — which meant you had to look, instead of just seeing.
  • Squares no longer ignore a press that lands slightly off. The clickable area used to be a small centre and a thin ring with a dead gap between them; the gap is filled, so anywhere inside the glow now counts.
  • During other players' turns, the game no longer waits for you to click through things you had no part in. Their blue and red square events, and the turn of the season, now pass on their own — press to skip ahead if you would rather not wait.
  • Items that carry you off — the Ekeko figure, the aeroplane, the balloon, the sail-trawler — now show the journey. The token walks the rails one square at a time with the item riding above it, instead of sliding straight across under a modal you could not see past.
v0.27.02026-08-09

The game remembers what you called yourself

  • Starting a new journey no longer means typing everyone's name again. The names you gave are waiting on the setup screen. Default names are not saved, so switching language still switches them.
v0.26.12026-08-09

Events now come from the board you are actually on

  • If you played India and then started a game in Bolivia, the blue and red squares kept handing you Indian events — a chai wallah refusing payment, on the altiplano. The board, the towns and the quiz all changed; only the events were left behind.
v0.26.02026-08-09

If you play with animation turned down, you can still see what happened

  • Some scenes hid the thing that mattered until the animation moved it into view — so with motion turned down, the pickpocket's take vanished from the pickpocket scene, and the surcharge vanished from the bill. Eleven of those are now visible whether anything moves or not.
  • France's cut-train scene read as a derailment — a carriage tipped nose-down with a shock star above it. The carriage was fine; the branch line under it had been drawn dropping away at an impossible gradient. The track is redrawn as coming toward you instead, and the train sits level again.
  • When two squares you could move to sounded exactly alike to a screen reader — same direction, same kind, same distance — there was no way to tell which one you were about to pick. They are told apart now.
v0.25.02026-08-09

Ibaraki's misfortunes are seven different people now

  • All seven of Ibaraki's misfortune scenes had the same figure in them — same red shirt, same raised arm, only the hat changed. Now there is a carrier with a shoulder pole, a driver sitting on his crates, someone pulling matting over the drying racks in the rain, a farmer crouched at the paddy edge tasting the water for salt.
  • The giant's footprint keeps its scene, with one addition: a heron already standing in the pond that appeared overnight. Some things do not drain away.
v0.24.02026-08-09

The travel log now speaks proper English, Spanish and French

  • Every line of the log put your name in front of a verb — and since the default name is a pronoun, the result was “You answers wrong” and “You is carried nine squares”, every single turn. The log now sets the name apart from what happened, the way the Japanese always did.
  • The same change fixes something quieter: in Spanish and French a few lines assumed the player was male. If you named yourself María, the game had been getting your grammar wrong all along.
  • Items that cannot do anything right now no longer let themselves be spent. Pressing the ch'alla offering without a spirit on you used to consume it for nothing; it now says why it is waiting.
  • Passing the misfortune to someone else now says who received it — it used to happen in silence. And a charm's description no longer promises to turn a wrong answer right: it absorbs the loss, but wrong stays wrong, which is the point.
  • Sixteen more quiz questions across the other five boards gave their answer away in a town card. Bolivia had nine of them. All six boards are clean now.
v0.23.02026-08-09

The misfortune spirit lets go, and the die shows what it rolled

  • Once the spirit took hold it never let go: it struck again every time you reached for the die, and the log filled with the same line forever. It now moves on at the end of a turn, to whoever is furthest behind — the way it was always meant to.
  • The die was landing on its side when it rolled a two or a five, so the face you saw was not the face it had rolled. That is why the number sometimes looked wrong, and why squares you thought were out of reach turned out not to be. It now settles upright whatever it rolls.
  • Items that let you name your own number — the Jōban Line timetable and its like on every board — did nothing at all. They vanished from your bag and that was that. They now open a panel where you pick one to six.
  • In a town you can now see what you have before you buy, what each purchase leaves you with, and how many businesses are still needed to double the income. Ushiku has its Great Buddha. And on the Ibaraki board, misfortune finally has pictures — a giant's footprint filling with water, a drying yard caught in the rain.
  • Ten of Ibaraki's questions have been rewritten. Some asked why something is so, which has no single answer; four gave their answer away in the town card you may already have read.
v0.22.02026-08-08

Every town on every board now looks like somewhere

  • All six boards are done. Where a town used to sit against a flat band of colour, there is now a place with people working in it — a bathing step at dusk, an oyster bed at low tide, a lake boat pulled by nothing but the wind. Three hundred and twenty-one towns, none of them bare.
  • On a tablet or a phone, opening a game used to put the die below the map — you had to scroll before you could do anything at all. The die, whose turn it is, and the hint now sit above the map, so the first thing you see is the thing you press.
  • When something happened on a rival's turn, the result still read as if it had happened to you — “You come out ahead, +Bs 200” under a heading that said CPU 1. Every one of the hundred and seven events has been rewritten so that only the heading says whose turn it is.
  • The square guide no longer sits open on top of the map, where it covered up to thirteen place names. It is a labelled button now — one press to read it, and nothing hidden behind it. In French the game had been addressing you two different ways in the same screen; it now speaks as it always did elsewhere.
v0.21.02026-08-08

Bolivia has more places to go, and the towns you visit look like somewhere

  • Five towns join the Bolivian board — Challapata on a lake that dried up, Chulumani on terraces older than the Inca, Totora, Punata, and Yacuiba where the railway stops at the border — with nine new lines between them. The board had fewer junctions than any other, so there was rarely a choice of route; now there is.
  • Seven new things can happen on the blue and red squares, so the same story stops coming round. You might help restring a charango — an instrument whose body was once an armadillo shell — or find the airstrip closed by the smoke of the season's field burning.
  • The pictures behind each town are much fuller. India's are finished — every one of its sixty towns now looks like a particular place, with people in it — and Bolivia and the round-the-world board are most of the way there. Where a town used to sit against a flat band of colour, there is now a street, a shore, or a market with someone working in it.
  • In English the turn indicator used to read “You’s turn” when you had not typed a name. It now says “Your turn”.
v0.20.02026-08-08

What your items do is written on them now

  • An item's effect was only written in a tooltip you had to hover over, so on a phone there was no way to read it at all. Each item now carries its effect under its name, where you can just see it.
  • Items you can use right now say so, and the ones that work on their own say that instead — you no longer have to tap one to find out whether tapping does anything.
  • The square guide now folds away, and it says what each colour actually does rather than only naming it.
  • When something happens on your turn, a short line slides in near the board. The travel log was at the bottom of the side panel, where nobody looks mid-game.
v0.19.02026-08-08

Money now lands with some weight

  • Your money no longer flicks from one number to the next. It rolls, and how long it takes depends on how much moved: small change counts up quickly, a big prize takes its time.
  • A gain lifts and turns gold, a loss dips and turns red, and the amount appears beside the total — so you can see what just happened without reading the log.
  • Arriving at your destination scatters coins, and a heavy loss shakes the number. Everyday quiz wins and blue squares stay quiet, and other travellers’ money moves without the fuss, so the big moments are the ones that stand out.
  • If your device is set to reduce motion, nothing rolls or scatters — the numbers simply change.
v0.18.12026-08-08

The legend no longer swallows your taps

  • The square guide sits in the top-left corner of the map, and squares underneath it could not be tapped at all. On the round-the-world board that corner is Europe, so London and its neighbours were impossible to choose at some window widths.
v0.17.02026-08-08

You can see where you may go, and the board answers when you press it

  • The squares you can reach were already being marked, but in the same gold as the quiz squares, so the mark vanished among them. Reachable squares now wear a thick white ring and everything else is dimmed, so they stand out at a glance.
  • Pressing a square you cannot reach used to do nothing at all, which looked broken. It now bumps back with a short sound and a red ring, so you can tell the game heard you and the square is simply out of range.
  • The die now lifts when you point at it and sinks when you press it, and it glows softly while it is your turn to roll — it was hard to tell it was a button at all.
  • The whole-map button now shows whether it is on: it turns gold, changes its picture, and puts a label beside itself, so you can tell the overview from the view you actually play in.
v0.16.22026-08-08

The board is no longer covered on tablet-sized windows

  • At in-between window widths the side panel was drawn on top of the map and hid the board. It now sits below the map, the way it does on a phone.
  • The starting player names now follow the language you are playing in. A name you type yourself is kept when you switch language.
  • When several trains stop on the same square they no longer pile up. They spread out so every colour stays visible, and the train whose turn it is is drawn in front.
v0.16.12026-08-08

The dice keep the number to themselves until they stop

  • Pressing the die used to show the number and light up the squares you could reach straight away, while the die was still in the air. Now nothing is shown until it lands.
  • The roll itself was redone. The bounces get lower and closer together as it settles, and the die goes a little too far and rocks back instead of stopping dead.
  • The faces are shaded differently from each other, so the die reads as a cube instead of a flat card, and it comes to rest at a slight angle.
v0.16.02026-08-08

The music can be turned off

  • There is a music button in the header now, on the title screen and while you play. Until today there was no way to stop the music from inside the game.
  • It stops the music only. The dice, the coins and the rest of the sound effects keep playing, because those are the game answering what you just did.
  • Your choice is remembered. Turn the music off today and it is still off the next time you open the game.
v0.15.12026-08-08

Eight lakes come back

  • Eight lakes had never once been drawn — Chilika and the Dal, Geneva and Annecy among them. They were written in degrees where the board wanted pixels, so each came out less than one pixel across and vanished without a trace.
v0.15.02026-08-08

Ibaraki — a whole board for one province

  • A sixth board, and the first that is not a country: one Japanese province, 36 towns, 40 new questions. The same machinery that draws the whole world draws a single province just as well.
  • In one province there is no such thing as a region having a good year while another has a bad one, so the seasons here are festivals instead: plums at Kairakuen in February, irises at Itako in June, the sea opening at Ōarai in July, fireworks judged at Tsuchiura in October, and the waterfall at Fukuroda freezing solid in January.
  • The spirit of misfortune here is the Daidarabō, the giant of the old shell-mound tale, whose footprints filled with water and became the ponds. The charm against him is a shell from that mound.
  • The world board also gained six port towns, so that ships no longer sail across dry land — Kolkata, Mombasa, Belém, Bandar Abbas, Veracruz and Lobito.
v0.14.02026-08-07

The game gets its old name back

  • This started life on the Bolivian altiplano, and it was called Altiplano Express. The name it picked up later said less, so it has the old one back — even though the trains now run through five parts of the world.
v0.13.52026-08-07

A compass in the corner

  • Every board is drawn with north at the top, so there is now a compass in the corner to say so. There is no scale bar — on the world board a single bar would be a lie somewhere, because a degree is not the same length everywhere.
v0.13.42026-08-07

The sea has shallows now

  • The sea was one flat colour, so the coast met it with a hard edge and the board looked like cut paper. The water is now lighter close to the shore and deepens as it goes out.
v0.13.32026-08-07

Ajaccio is readable again

  • The key to the squares sat on the board itself, so it covered whatever was in the bottom-right corner — Corsica on the French map, New Zealand on the world one. It now sits in the corner of the screen instead, and stays the same size however far you zoom in.
v0.13.22026-08-07

The lines bend, not snap

  • Where a line changed direction it used to turn a hard right angle. It now sweeps round the bend, the way an underground map does — the board reads softer without losing any of its straightness.
v0.13.12026-08-07

You can see the moment a town changes hands

  • When a town becomes yours, the ring around it swells once and settles. It happens only on the change, so the board stays calm the rest of the time.
v0.13.02026-08-07

The map turns your colour

  • Buying a business used to change nothing on the map — you had to read the numbers on the side. Now a town you own wears a ring in your colour.
  • Own every business in a town and the ring doubles and thickens — you can spot your monopolies across the whole board at a glance.
  • Where two travellers own the same number in one town, it stays uncoloured — it would be a lie to paint it as anyone's.
v0.12.12026-08-07

The map reads properly now

  • The lines were supposed to run only up, across or at 45° — but only 5% of them actually did. Now every single one does, on all five boards.
  • Around Osaka and Kyoto the squares were sitting on top of the town markers, hiding them. They now slide along the line instead.
  • France was drawn half again too tall. It is a country almost as wide as it is high, and now it looks like one.
  • The white patch on Hokkaidō had green spikes poking out of it and meant nothing. It now follows the shape of the island — it is the snow country.
v0.12.02026-08-07

France and the world start moving

  • The two newest boards were still standing still. Now every month, every town, every misfortune and every thing that can happen to you has a picture that moves — 94 new ones.
  • On the world board seven of the twelve months are split down the middle, because the hemispheres disagree: cherry blossom on one side and the grape harvest on the other, snow in one half and a beach in the other.
  • August on the world board is the doldrums: the sails hang flat, the sea turns to a mirror, and even the misfortune spirit cannot move.
  • In France, Easter begins with the bells flying off to Rome — in the old story it is the bells, not a rabbit, that bring the eggs back.
v0.11.02026-08-07

Around the World

  • A fifth board, and the first that is not a country: 60 cities on six continents, 40 new questions, and 90 routes — 50 by land, 40 by sea.
  • Where the land runs on, you take the train — Moscow to Ulaanbaatar is the Trans-Siberian, and Cairo to Jerusalem crosses the Sinai. Everywhere else you take a ship.
  • Because the hemispheres run opposite, no month is good everywhere. July empties Europe and North America while the great migration fills East Africa; December is snow in one half and swimming in the other.
  • The spirit of misfortune here is the Flying Dutchman, the ship that swore to round the Cape whatever came and was never let into port again. His charm is a Saint Christopher medal.
v0.10.02026-08-07

A new departure board

  • The first screen now has a train on it. It runs along a dawn ridge, and the golden track ahead of the locomotive is still being laid — the journey you are about to choose.
  • Choosing a country is now a grid of maps instead of a long list, so you can see every board at once.
  • The settings are sorted into who is riding and the house rules, and the empty fourth seat is hidden until you ask for it. Three travellers and one tap is enough to leave.
  • If you prefer things to hold still, the train stops when your device asks for reduced motion.
v0.9.02026-08-07

France joins the map

  • A fourth country: France, with 50 towns from Lille to Ajaccio, a sea crossing to Corsica, 40 new questions and 16 things that can happen to you on the road.
  • The misfortune spirit here is the Ankou of Brittany — not death itself but death's servant, who in the old tales collects souls in a cart. The charm that wards him off is a blessed sprig of box, handed out on Palm Sunday where no palm will grow.
  • In August the whole country goes on holiday: Paris earns less, the Mediterranean earns far more, and even the misfortune spirit takes the month off.
v0.8.02026-08-07

The towns come alive

  • Every town illustration now moves. Waves roll into the harbours, steam rises from the hot springs, snow falls on the northern towns, city windows flicker, and condors glide over the valleys — 43 scenes in all.
  • The original artwork is untouched — the movement is a thin layer laid over it, so the pictures you knew are still there.
v0.7.02026-08-07

The season decides what happens

  • What happens on a blue or red square now depends on the month as well as the region. Drift ice only strands you in winter, the salmon run only pays in autumn, and cherry-blossom work only comes up in April.
  • On the Sea of Japan side, winter now brings more misfortune than good luck — buried tracks and roof-clearing bills — while summer stays even.
v0.6.22026-08-07

Everything has a scene now

  • Departing, and answering a quiz, now have their own scene: a train pulling out at dawn with someone waving it off, and a circle or cross drawn on screen.
  • When the misfortune spirit strikes, you now see what actually happened — a typhoon shutting the shops, a landslide taking the stall down the hillside, a hand slipping into your bag on a packed train. 21 scenes in all.
v0.6.02026-08-07

Things that happen to you

  • Blue and red squares are back, but the money no longer moves at random. You get a short story from that region — the drift ice comes early and the ferry is cancelled, a zebra-suited traffic marshal in La Paz returns your dropped bag, a chai seller refuses payment because you are the first customer of the day.
  • Everything now moves. 49 events, 36 monthly seasons, the arrival at your destination and the prize-giving all have their own short animation.
  • The game now ends with a prize-giving. Awards like Quiz Master and Great Traveller are revealed one at a time, so nobody knows who won until the very last card.
  • Rail lines now run only up, across or at 45°, which makes the board far easier to read.
  • You can now change language from inside a pop-up, so you can re-read a story in your own language.
  • The dice roll stays on screen while you choose where to stop, and the dice now land with a thump and a puff of dust.
  • Item prices were rebalanced — no item is a guaranteed profit any more.
  • Map fixes: Honshū, Shikoku and Kyūshū are separate islands again, and every town now sits on land.
v0.5.02026-08-06

Japan, town by town

  • Japan now has 151 towns instead of 74. Alongside the prefectural capitals you can now stop at Tsukuba, Ōarai, Hiraizumi, Ginzan Onsen, Shirakawa-gō, Kamikōchi, Uji, Miyajima, Naoshima, Dazaifu, Aso, Chiran and many more.
  • Each new town has its own story to read when you land there — why the roofs are that steep, why the gods gather there in October, why the town refused to modernise.
  • The board was widened to match, so the extra towns have room to breathe rather than piling on top of each other.
  • The far south-west islands — Ishigaki, Taketomi and Yonaguni — were being drawn off the edge of the board and are now on it.
v0.4.02026-08-06

India, and a board you can see

  • A third country: India, with 60 towns from Leh to Kanyakumari, sea routes to the Andaman and Lakshadweep islands, and 42 new questions.
  • Japan gained 13 island towns reached by sea — from Izu Ōshima and Sado to Amami, Yakushima and Ishigaki — plus 10 more towns in Hokkaidō.
  • Your piece is now a locomotive instead of a dot, so you can find yourself on a crowded map.
  • Items that roll two or three dice now show every die and the total, so the number you see always matches the squares you move.
  • When a rival answers a question, only the result is shown — the question and answer stay hidden so they are not spoiled for you.
  • The whole map now fits in the window, and turning on "whole map" really shows all of it.
  • If your system asks for reduced motion, the dice now settle at once instead of tumbling.
v0.3.02026-08-06

Learning, properly

  • Answering a quiz now always shows the correct answer and the explanation — even when you get it right.
  • At the end of the journey you get a review of every question the table got wrong.
  • Questions no longer repeat until the whole set has been used.
  • Each player can now say how well they know the country. Newcomers get two choices instead of three and bigger rewards; locals earn less and risk more.
  • Lucky charms now absorb the loss instead of turning a wrong answer into a right one, so you always know when you missed.
v0.2.02026-08-06

A bigger board and livelier rivals

  • Japan now has at least one town in every prefecture (30 → 52), including Mito, Kawagoe, Hikone, Kōyasan and Hagi.
  • The maps were redrawn to follow the real coastlines and borders more closely.
  • You can drag the map to look around and zoom with the wheel. Town names no longer overlap.
  • On the rivals' turns you now see the dice roll, the move, and exactly what they bought.
  • The language can be changed during a game, and the travel log is translated too.
  • Money is shown in each country's currency (Bs 1,200 / ¥120,000).
v0.1.02026-08-05

First journey

  • Two countries to travel — Bolivia and Japan — in four languages.
  • Music that changes with the region, sound effects, and a rolling 3D die.
  • Towns tell their story and sell businesses; buy every business in a town to double its income.
  • Your journey is saved in this browser, so you can continue later.