Watching Brief
A rescue excavation played as a deduction game. Buried features lie in straight runs that never touch, the figures you dig up tell you where, and a contractor's machine strips one row of the site every few days — whatever you have not excavated or correctly marked by then is gone from the record.
Watching Brief
A developer has the site and the machines are already on it, working north from the southern edge. You have the length of the season to record what is under the topsoil, and the geophysics report is all you start with: it counted the anomalous squares but could not say which ones they are.
Every square you open costs a working day. When the days run out the southern-most surviving row is stripped, and every square in it is settled on the spot — excavated or correctly marked and it enters the archive, anything else is a fault against the record. Run up the faults your brief allows and the county archaeologist closes the excavation.
So the site has to be resolved from the bottom up, while the evidence for the bottom row only comes from digging above it. That is the whole game: spend the days ahead of the machine line, not behind it.
The ground rules
An excavated square reports how many anomalous squares lie in the eight around it. A square reading nothing has nothing beside it, so its clear neighbours come off in the same day.
The features are not scattered points. Each one is a straight run of one, two or three squares — orthogonal — and no two features ever touch, not even at a corner. A 3 is therefore not a coin toss; it is a statement about alignment, and an isolated find pins the empty ring around itself. Reasoning about the shape of what is buried is worth more here than counting.
Marking is not bookkeeping either. It is the only way a feature survives — you never excavate one deliberately, you record it and let it go under with the row. A mark on empty ground is a false entry and costs you exactly as much as a missed one.
| Control | Effect |
|---|---|
| Click a square | Excavate it. One working day, whatever comes off with it. |
| Right-click, long-press, shift-click | Mark a square as a feature. Free, and reversible until the machines arrive. |
| Excavate / Mark | Switches what a plain click does, for touch and for keyboards. |
| Transect | Arms the instrument; then click a letter or a number in the margin. It reports how many anomalous squares are still in the ground along that whole line, and costs two days. You get a handful per site. |
| Evaluation · Rescue · Salvage | The brief: days between strips, faults allowed, transects, and how much is buried. Salvage gives you five days a row, three faults and nineteen squares to find. |
| New site | A fresh site code and a fresh problem. |
Reading the sheet
The red line across the plan is the machine edge; it moves up one row at a time, and the figure at the top left is the days left before it does. The first row gets a longer run than the rest — the machines are on the haul road to begin with, which is the only reason a row nobody has dug yet can be resolved at all. The evaluation trench is already open when you arrive: the one square guaranteed to be clear, always in the southern half, where the pressure is.
Nothing is confirmed early. A mark stays a claim until the row goes, and the day book is the only record of what it cost.