Golden Capstone
A stone at a time, a pyramid that leans the way you timed it, and a gold pyramidion for whoever gets to the top. This sheet explains the build, and it says where to write when something is wrong.
Support · iPhoneWhat one tap does
- A limestone block swings left and right above the tower. It never stops on its own.
- Tap anywhere. The block drops straight down onto the course under it.
- Whatever hangs past the edge below breaks off and falls to the sand. The rest stays, and the tower is that much narrower for the next one.
Drop a block with no stone at all beneath it and the pyramid comes down — that ends the round. Points already earned are kept; only the building stops.
Why some drops keep their full width
A landing counts as square when the block's centre is within about nine points of the centre below, or within seven per cent of the block's own width, whichever is the larger target. That is deliberately about a fingertip wide on the opening courses, and it stays proportional as the tower narrows.
A square landing loses nothing. The stone keeps its width, glints gold, and the run of square landings — the streak — carries on. One overhang resets the streak to nothing.
The target shrinks with the tower, not with the clock. There is no timer in a round, and a block you leave swinging costs you nothing except patience.
How the score adds up
Nothing else multiplies anything. The best a single ordinary course can be worth is sixty, and the number on the result screen is simply those lines added together.
Two records are kept apart from the score: the tallest pyramid you have built, counted in tiers, and the longest streak of square landings. Both are on the Settings screen.
The pyramidion, and how a round ends
Once the tower has narrowed to about a fifth of the width it started at — or once twenty-eight courses are up, whichever comes first — the next block offered is the golden pyramidion. It is a quarter narrower than the course below, it sweeps faster than anything before it, and it is held to a tighter mark.
It is also the last block either way. Set it and the pyramid is finished and crowned. Miss it and the tower comes down, the round ends, and every point scored on the way up still counts. A failed pyramidion costs the crown, not the round.
A round can also be stopped by hand: tap pause, then End round. That is a finished round and it is written down like any other.
Six things sealed inside
- Grain chest — five tiers
- The first thing the treasury ever holds.
- Canopic jars — ten tiers
- Four stoppered jars, carved rather than painted.
- Alabaster vessels — fifteen tiers
- Pale stone, the one thing in the chamber that catches light.
- Golden mask — twenty tiers
- The halfway mark of a long pyramid, in practice.
- Solar barque — twenty-five tiers
- A boat for the crossing, and the deepest chamber that counts tiers.
- Necropolis seal — a finished pyramid
- Not on the tier count at all. The pyramidion has to be set.
Thresholds are read against your tallest run, not the one you just played, so nothing in the treasury is ever taken back. A tier that seals something in announces it on a card that slides in while the round carries on underneath — the block keeps swinging, and the card leaves by itself.
The second pyramid is not the first one again
The block you start with is narrower once you have a record behind you: three per cent off for every ten tiers of your best run, and it never goes below roughly half the width of the playfield. The swing also quickens course by course, from about four tenths of a playfield each second at the base to something close to double that thirty courses up.
Nothing in a round is random. The block's starting position is worked out from the course number, so the same record and the same taps give the same round every time. If a tower felt different today, the difference is the record, not luck.
Clearing your data (Course 08) puts the opening width back where a first-time builder finds it.
When the site does not behave
The tap landed the block somewhere else
The drop is taken where the block was at the moment of the tap, not where your finger touched the glass. Aim by watching the stone, not the screen.
No sound, or no vibration
Sound, music and vibration are three separate switches on the Settings screen, under Audio. Sound also follows the phone's silent switch, and vibration is off on a phone in Low Power Mode.
Choosing a portrait does nothing
The architect's portrait needs access to your photos. If the picker refuses to open, the permission was declined once; the app offers a shortcut into the system Settings when that happens, and the switch is under Golden Capstone → Photos.
The record is gone
Records live on the phone alone. Deleting the app, or clearing data in Settings, takes them with it, and reinstalling starts an empty plateau. There is no account to restore from.
The interface is in the wrong language
The build site is set to a language of its own, apart from the phone's. Settings → Language, and the change is immediate.
The picture from a notification did not arrive
A notification that carried an image and shows none was still delivered correctly — the text is always shown, and the picture is dropped rather than delaying it.
What the app asks for, and what it keeps
- Your records, tiers, treasury, architect name and portrait
- On the phone, and nowhere else. The portrait is a file in the app's own storage; the rest are a handful of numbers. None of it leaves the device.
- Photos
- Asked for once, when you choose a portrait. Nothing is read from your library otherwise, and the picture you pick is not uploaded.
- Notifications
- Asked for at the start. Decline and the game is unaffected — nothing in a round depends on it.
- Tracking (the App Tracking Transparency prompt)
- Used to tell which campaign brought an install and to measure how that campaign did. Decline it and the game plays exactly the same.
To erase the lot: Settings → Reset data, then confirm. It clears the record, the tiers, the treasury and the profile in one go, and it cannot be undone. Deleting the app does the same thing.
There is no account, no sign-in and no cloud save. Golden Capstone is free, and it has no purchases, no subscriptions and nothing to unlock with money.
What third-party services receive, and how long anything is retained, is set out in the privacy policy. Requests about your data — a copy, a correction, an erasure — go to the address below and are answered by a person.
Writing to us
One address, read by the people who built the game. Expect an answer within one or two working days; a letter sent over a weekend waits for Monday.
Put this in the letter, and the first reply can be an answer rather than a question:
- which iPhone, and which version of iOS
- what you were doing — the tier you were on, or the screen you were looking at
- what happened, and what you expected instead
- a screenshot or a short recording, if the problem can be seen