Daily Dungeon Dig is a free roguelite dungeon game: each day there is one new burrow of five small floors, the same for everyone, and you dig down past garden pests to the nut pantry at the bottom.

Why a burrow, and why daily?

Classic dungeon games have a lot of rules. We kept the core: a small grid, one square per move, and monsters that only move when you do. Nothing happens while you think, so a kid can take their time and an adult can plan five moves ahead.

Here the dungeon is a burrow under a garden. You start as a field mouse, and the monsters are ants, snails, grasshoppers, beetles, mosquitoes and one big rat near the last ladder. There are no swords. You bonk the pests until they scurry off.

The daily part means everyone gets the same five floors on the same day. The burrow is built from the date in Singapore, so you can hold your run up against a friend’s and see who got deeper, and in fewer turns.

A short history of the roguelike

In 1980 Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made a game called Rogue. Ken Arnold joined the work later at Berkeley. Rogue drew its dungeon with letters and symbols on a text screen, so a Z was a zombie. Every game built a new dungeon at random, and when your character died, that run was over for good. It spread on university computers through BSD Unix, and players later named a genre after it: roguelikes.

Fans argued for years about what counted. At the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin in 2008, players and developers wrote down a list of common features, now called the Berlin Interpretation.

Many newer games keep the random levels and the fresh start, but let you hold on to something between runs, such as new characters or upgrades. People call these roguelites. Daily Dungeon Dig is one. Your critter starts over each run, but the leaves you collect stay yours.

How to play

1. Pick a critter. The field mouse is free. The others cost leaves, and each has one small perk.
2. Tap Dig today’s burrow. Move one square at a time with the arrow keys, a swipe, a tap or the arrow buttons. After every move, the pests take their turn.
3. Walk into a pest to bonk it. Pests with more than one heart show them as small dots.
4. Step on seeds and berries to get hearts back. Pick up tools for your 3 pockets. Each tool works once.
5. Find the ladder on each floor. Under floor 5 is the pantry.
6. When the run ends, you get 1 to 3 stars, your leaves and a result you can share.

Your first run each day is your daily result. After that, practice burrows are unlimited, and they earn leaves too. Hard mode turns off perks and makes pests tougher, and it keeps the run’s leaves only if you reach the pantry.

Tips

Let them come to you. Sleeping pests show a small z. When an awake pest is two squares away, wait a turn. It steps up next to you, and you get the first bonk.

Save snacks for later. If your hearts are full, a seed stays where it is. Remember the spot and come back when you are hurt.

Keep chamomile for the rat. The rat on floor 5 has the most hearts. Five turns of napping is often enough to slip past it to the pantry.

Questions

Is the daily burrow the same for everyone?

Yes. The floors, pests and items come from the date in Singapore, so everyone who plays that day digs through the same five floors. Your critter is your own choice, so runs can still differ. A new burrow opens at midnight, Singapore time.

What happens if I miss a day?

Nothing. There is no streak to lose. The game counts the days you have played, and that number only goes up. Practice burrows are always open.

Do I lose my leaves when a run ends?

No. Leaves from normal runs are yours to keep, whether you reach the pantry or not, and critters you unlock stay unlocked. The one exception is Hard mode, which you choose before a run. There, the run’s leaves only count if you reach the pantry. Leaves you already have are never touched.

Your turn

Today’s burrow is waiting at the top of this page. Pick a critter, find the first ladder, and see how deep you can get.