Dowser

Minesweeper with no numbers.

Nobody hands you a count here. You sweep a hazel rod across an old field and read the ground by hand: the brass needle and the rod's tone follow whatever lies under the tip, and the grass keeps a glowing contour map of everything you have swept. Bronze pulls the needle hard. Bone barely stirs it. Iron swings it below the line. A live shell from an old war rings sharp inside a cold halo. Stake the relics, leave the shell where it lies, then dig.

• 15 fields, 3 digs. The Thistle Field, the Mosaic Floor and the Colonnade, each field laid out once and checked by a solver and by a rule-follower that reads the glow using only the game's notes: every one can be read without guessing.
• Five notes, learned one at a time. Relics rise. A live shell rings. Depth spreads a reading wide and faint. Iron swings on its east side. A void sinks.
• Read it like a survey map. The glow is drawn as contour rings; stake the centre of a round one. Hover anywhere you have swept to read the exact number the rod left there.
• A clean dig is every relic and not one wasted stake, on your first try. Dig a shell and the day's finds are lost; every result shows where everything lay, so a second dig can only be marked dug.
• A cabinet of finds. Every relic you dig clean comes home: censers, bells, urns, skulls and more, drawn from our own grave-goods sprite pack.

Play the free demo in your browser

The first 4 fields are free to play right here, in the Thistle Field, and they teach the shell, depth and iron. The full game (Windows, one portable .exe) has all 15 fields, the Mosaic Floor and the Colonnade, voids, crowded and deeper ground, the whole cabinet, and the end of the season.

Controls

Mouse: drag inside the rope to sweep, right-click a spot to place or pull a stake, press DIG (or ENTER). Keyboard: arrows walk the rod and sweep, E stakes, X pulls every stake, ENTER digs, T toggles stake mode, H opens the notes, ESC pauses, M toggles sound. Touch: drag to sweep, turn on STAKE MODE and tap. The game saves your digs and your cabinet as you go.

Made by CSAF

The ground and ruins are our own 16x16 tileset Verdant 23 · Ruins, and the finds come from our sprite pack Mourncrest 05 · Grave Goods. The lettering is our own; the music and sound are synthesised from note data with no samples, and the rod's tone is played live from the reading. If you like games you have to work out, Stringline is a castle whodunit where every clue is a line you draw.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text of this game were made with generative AI assistance. The music and sound are procedural synthesis, not generative audio.