What is The Fossil Dig
The Fossil Dig gives you a square of rock, a handful of buried fossils and an oil lamp that is going out. Each tile of the grid carries a number — one, two or three — which is how many layers of stone lie between you and whatever is underneath. Some tiles hide a fossil. Most hide nothing at all. The whole game is the gap between those two sentences.
What makes it tight is the oil. The lamp is not filled generously and then drained: it is filled with exactly as much oil as it takes to dig out every fossil on the board, plus three drops. Three. That is your entire allowance for being wrong. Dig a bare tile down to the bottom and you have spent one, two or three of them on nothing. So the digging is never the puzzle — finding out where to dig is.
How to play
- Three explorers share the board and you switch between them with the keys 1, 2 and 3, or by clicking their portraits. Lidenbrock surveys a 3×3 square and shows you which of those nine tiles hold a fossil and which are bare — that costs a survey, not oil, and you get between two and four of them per stratum. Axel digs one layer off one tile for one drop of oil, and a fossil he reaches is recovered whole. Hans swings at five tiles at once — the tile you pick and its four neighbours — also for one drop, but any fossil he breaks through is shattered.
- A stratum ends the moment every fossil on it is accounted for, recovered or shattered. Bare rock never has to be cleared: you can leave two thirds of the board untouched and still descend. Recovering a fossil pays ten points for every layer that was on top of it, so the deep ones are worth the most. Descending pays five points for every drop of oil still in the lamp, and thirty more if nothing was shattered.
- The run ends in one of two ways. Reach the seventh stratum — the Centre — and the expedition is complete. Or run the lamp dry with fossils still buried, and the dig ends where it stands, with whatever you scored. There is no losing screen that takes your points away.
- On a phone, tap a portrait to choose an explorer and tap a tile to use them. On a computer the arrow keys move a cursor and Enter digs, so the whole game can be played without a mouse.
Strategies that work
- Hans is not the reckless option — he is the arithmetic. One drop of oil buys him one layer off five tiles, where Axel buys one layer off one. When there are fossils you have not located, hammering the unknown ground with Hans is the only way to search it without burning your three-drop margin. A shattered fossil scores nothing, but it still counts as accounted for, and it still lets you descend.
- Count. The panel tells you how many fossils the stratum holds, and every survey tells you how many you have found. When those two numbers match, stop searching and just dig — every further drop spent on unknown ground is wasted.
- Spend the surveys first, before you touch anything. They cost no oil at all, so there is never a reason to save one, and information you get early changes every decision after it. Place them so the nine tiles overlap as little as possible.
- Axel on a tile marked 1 is the cheapest question in the game: one drop, and you learn what is under it — and if it is a fossil, you get it whole rather than in pieces. Do that before you start hammering, but only on tiles you already have a reason to suspect.
- The perfect-stratum bonus is thirty points and the oil bonus is five a drop, so a careful stratum finished with six drops left pays sixty. That is worth roughly one deep fossil. Do not spend four extra drops chasing a clean sheet.
A little history
Jules Verne published Voyage au centre de la Terre in 1864, and sent Professor Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel and their Icelandic guide Hans down a volcano into a world of fossil seas and prehistoric bones. The three explorers here are named for them and divided the way Verne divided them: the professor who reads the ground, the nephew who does the careful work, and the guide who is simply stronger than the problem. What the game takes from the novel is not the plot but its geology — the idea that going down is going backwards through time, and that each layer of rock is a different age with different things buried in it. The rest is a deduction puzzle of a kind that came much later: a grid of unknowns, a source of partial information, and a budget too small to be wrong with. Minesweeper made that shape famous by killing you for a mistake. Here a mistake costs oil, and the lamp just gets dimmer.
Frequently asked questions
How much oil do I actually get?
Exactly enough to dig out every fossil on the board with Axel, plus three drops. That is deliberate: the digging is never the hard part, so the game only gives you a margin for being wrong about where the fossils are.
Should I ever use Hans if he breaks fossils?
Yes, constantly. He removes a layer from five tiles for the price of one, which is the only affordable way to search ground you have not surveyed. A shattered fossil pays nothing, but it counts towards finishing the stratum — and finishing is what lets you descend and keep scoring.
Do I have to clear the whole grid?
No. The stratum ends as soon as every fossil is recovered or shattered, however much bare rock is left. Clearing tiles you have already surveyed and found empty is pure waste.
Is the daily challenge the same for everyone?
Yes. The board, the fossils, their depths and the number of surveys all come from the day's seed, so every player in the world digs exactly the same seven strata. The date changes at midnight UTC, not on your own clock.
