Dig Site

Dig Site is a free daily treasure hunt game and deduction puzzle, a modern take on the classic hot and cold game, played against the clock. An artefact, a gold coin, a bronze key, a clay oil lamp or an amber bead, is buried somewhere in a 12×12 archaeological dig grid, and you have six digs to find it. Each trench you open reads the soil, and the soil never lies: with careful reasoning you can always find the find in time. Then the next site is dealt, and the next, until the sundown two minutes later. Everyone digs the same sites in the same order that day, a new dig opens every day at midnight ET, and it runs in your browser with no download, which makes it one of our favourite daily puzzle games like Wordle and quick games.

The clues are simple and honest. A trench's soil colour says how far away the find is, counted in rings of squares around it: scorching means it touches the trench, hot is two squares away, warm three, cool four to six and cold seven or more. The band is pegged out with coloured string, so the find always lies between the strings. And when the find is in the same row, column or diagonal as your trench, a pottery shard turns up lying along that line, with a dashed string across the whole site. No shard means the find is not in line with that trench at all. Put two or three trenches together and only one square fits them all: that is where you dig.

Every find pays points: 100 for the find, 40 for every dig you did not need (out of six) and up to 100 for speed, all of it if you find it the moment the site is dealt and none after thirty seconds. A site that keeps its find pays nothing, but the next one is dealt at once. So the sharpest diggers read the clues fast and find each site in three or four digs, and a good day is five to eight finds. The end card stamps your finds and points, shows a chip for every site you dug, and puts you among everyone else's day: how many finds the crowd made and how many of today's diggers you beat on points ("more points than 63% of today's diggers, most found 5"). The share button sends a line like Dig Site #12 · 6 finds · 1,480 points with a row of squares, one per site.

Everyone digs the same sites in the same order each day, with one go each, and your day goes on the leaderboards of our competitive games, which rank the day's points; top results are verified by replaying them on our servers. The first time you play, a ten-second "how clues work" plays on a tiny 5×5 example right under the site.

Dig Site plays the same on a phone or a computer. On a phone, tap a square to stake it and tap it again, or the big DIG bar, to open the trench. With a mouse, click instead; on a keyboard, the arrow keys move the stake and Enter digs. It belongs with our puzzle games, logic puzzles, brain games, mobile games, PC games and casual games for adults, and it is a perfect free game to play at work on a coffee break.