Gold Digger is a judgment game about commodities. You are shown a market with the ending cut off, you say which way it went and how sure you are, and then the game shows you what actually happened and scores how well your confidence matched your accuracy.
That scoring is the whole point. Most trading games reward the player who guessed right; this one rewards the player who knew how right they were likely to be. Being 55% sure and correct 55% of the time is a skill. Being 95% sure and correct 55% of the time is the thing that empties accounts, and it is invisible until someone measures it.
Gwen — the narrator — is not on your side. She is on the record's side. If she sounds pleased when you lose, it is because a loss you predicted is worth more than a win you didn't.
The scenarios are drawn from real historical series, not generated. Oil, natural gas and copper come from FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis); the gold series comes from the open datahub gold-prices dataset, which runs monthly from 1833. Outcomes are derived from the series itself rather than from a stored label, so the chart you look at and the score you get can never disagree.
Every source we lean on is named on the Data & Sources page, and the reasoning behind the design is written up as three essays on Research & Method. The “experts” in the game are fictional characters, but each one points at the real analysts and institutions whose actual positions they caricature.
It is not investment advice, it is not a broker, and it is not gambling. All capital in the game is virtual and cannot be cashed out, exchanged, or transferred. Nothing you do here moves money in the world. The long version is in the Terms of Service, and we mean the long version — it is written in plain English on purpose.
It is also not affiliated with, and shares nothing but a name with, any investment scheme, trading signal service, or crypto product also called “Gold Digger.” If that is what brought you here, this isn't it — we'd rather lose that traffic than be mistaken for it.
Three ways, all of them visible. Advertising (never mid-decision — an ad between you and a call you are thinking about is a tax on the one thing the game is for). The optional Vault Pass, which removes the ads and unlocks deeper analytics. And, in future, sponsored placements in the source registry, which will be labelled as such wherever they appear.
The leaderboard is free and stays free. Depth is a paid feature; the ranking is not. Why that is a design decision rather than a pricing accident is the subject of one of the three essays.
Which analytics and advertising vendors we let near you is listed by name in the Privacy Policy. If a tool sets a cookie, it is in there — not filed under “analytics” and hoped past you.
Gold Digger is made by Screwcap Games, LLC, a small independent studio in Walworth County, Wisconsin, building games about judgment under uncertainty — markets, monetary policy, household finance, and a couple of card and domino games that are just games. The rest of the catalogue is at Screwcap.Games.
Bugs, corrections, licensing, or an argument about Kelly sizing: andrew@screwcapholdings.com. Corrections to the data or the history get answered first — if a chart here is wrong, we want to know before a player does.