Browser Support & Troubleshooting
Kipukas runs entirely in your browser — there is no backend, and every card image is decoded on your own device. That keeps the binder private and free, but it also means a handful of quirks come down to your browser's settings rather than a bug on our end. Here are the ones we know about and how to fix each in a few seconds.
The binder is very slow on a hardened browser
If you're on GrapheneOS Vanadium (or a similarly locked-down browser) the binder can feel sluggish — cards take noticeably longer to appear. This is by design: Vanadium turns off the JavaScript JIT as a security hardening measure, which forces our WebAssembly image decoder to run interpreted instead of compiled. The work still happens, just much more slowly.
Fix: allow the JIT for this site. In Vanadium, open the site settings for kipukas.cards (tap the lock/page icon in the address bar → site settings) and enable JavaScript JIT. Reload, and the binder runs at full speed. Testers have confirmed this resolves it completely.
Other privacy-focused browsers — Cromite, Trichrome, IronFox, and Floorp — keep the JIT on, so they're already fast with no changes needed.
Cards show up as gray tiles
Each card's art is decoded locally with WebAssembly. If the gray placeholder tiles never fill in with art, it almost always means your browser (or a privacy extension) is blocking WebAssembly or JavaScript for the site. Our decoder also requires WASM SIMD, so a browser with WASM restricted can't paint the images at all.
Fix: allow JavaScript and WebAssembly for kipukas.cards (and whitelist the site in any script-blocking extension), then reload. The tiles will fill in.
Multiplayer won't connect on my VPN
Multiplayer rooms sync over a lightweight relay connection. Some VPNs block the underlying WebSocket/WebRTC traffic that relay needs, so the room never connects (a tester first hit this on Riseup VPN). Everything else — browsing the binder, single-device tools, and offline play — is unaffected, since none of it touches the network.
Fix: turn the VPN off while playing multiplayer, or use split-tunneling / an allowlist to exempt kipukas.cards from the tunnel. Re-join the room afterward.
I'm still seeing an old version
The binder is offline-first: a background service worker caches the app so it loads instantly and works without a connection. After we ship an update, the new version downloads in the background and applies the next time you reopen the app — so it normally self-heals on its own.
Fix (if you want it now): in the browser, do a hard refresh (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + R, or pull-to-refresh on mobile). For the installed app, fully close and reopen it. If something still looks wrong after that, clearing the site's data and reloading will rebuild the cache from scratch — your saved progress lives in your encrypted player backup, so export one first from the menu if you haven't.
Hit something not listed here? It may be a real bug — let us know and we'll take a look.