Sherd
A calm logic puzzle with no words in play. Paint five cells, read three marks, and reason your way to it.
The cell is part of the shard.
The shard is not here, but it touches this cell on a side.
Neither. The cell and its four side neighbours are ruled out.
A shard of five connected cells is buried somewhere in a 6 by 6 dig. Connected means every cell of it touches another on a side, never only at a corner. The shard can be turned or flipped any way, which leaves 1,024 places where it could be. You have six tries to dig it up.
Touch a cell and drag through its neighbours to paint five connected cells, or tap them one at a time. Dragging back onto the last cell takes it off again, and Undo and Clear sit under the board. Dig lights up once exactly five connected cells are painted. Your probe can be any shape at all: it does not have to look like the shard you are hunting.
Press Dig and every cell you probed is stamped with a mark. Glaze means that cell belongs to the shard. A hatched rim means the shard is not in that cell but touches it on at least one side; it never says which side. Plain soil means the shard is not there and does not touch it.
Soil carries more than it seems. If the shard sat in any side neighbour of a soil cell, that cell would have come back as a rim, so soil clears a whole plus shape: the cell and its four neighbours. The board shades those neighbours as sifted soil, so you can see at a glance where the shard cannot be.
Each try narrows the places the shard could still be. Paint exactly its five cells and it fuses into one glazed piece. The result card draws the narrowing as a line, from 1,024 before your first try down to one, so you can see which try did the most work.
The daily dig is the same 6 by 6 puzzle for everyone on a given date, with six tries. The Expedition is an endless run of digs that grows: the Terrace is 6 by 6, the Trench is 7 by 7 with six cell shards, and Bedrock and the Deep site add rock cells you cannot probe. Expedition digs have a par and give up to three stars.
One dig a day, numbered from your own calendar date, so it changes at your midnight and not at a fixed hour somewhere else. Every day in the table was screened with a solver, and the hardest ones were left out.
Keep a streak, earn a glaze piece for each daily you solve, and share your result as rows of coloured squares that show how close each try came without giving the answer away. Past dailies wait in the archive.
Short digs of a minute or two along a site map, each with a par.
Every solved Expedition dig earns fragments, and fragments rebuild eighteen vessels from three invented cultures, from the base up, the way a conservator puts a pot back together.
Velan tall necked jars with cobalt chevrons and wave lines.
Oru squat round pots in iron red slip with dot rosettes.
Tesh flared beakers with black stepped triangles.
The glaze pieces you earn from the daily dip your restored vessels in cobalt glaze.
Make your first probe a long line or a wide L across the middle. It touches many cells, and every soil mark it gets back clears a plus of five cells, so even a probe that finds nothing rules out a large band of the grid.
A rim says the shard touches that cell on some side. Look at its neighbours: if three of them are soil or already ruled out, the shard must sit on the fourth.
The daily shard is five connected cells, so any two of its cells are at most four steps apart along the grid. Once you have a glaze, forget everything more than four steps from it (five steps for the six cell shards deeper in the Expedition).
Any shape is a legal probe, and early on a probe chosen only to learn can be the better try. By the last two tries, paint a shape that could still be the shard: only that kind of probe can win.
In the Bedrock and Deep sites, the shard never crosses rock. A pocket of open cells smaller than the shard, walled in by rock and the edge, can be ignored, and so can every shape that would have to pass through rock to fit.
After a dig, look at how far each try cut the count of possible places. Tries that cut it by ten or more are the ones to copy; a try that barely moved it usually probed cells you had already ruled out.
Sherd is free on Google Play with ads, and an optional one-time Remove ads and archive purchase takes them away. There are never ads during a dig or around the daily; a full screen ad can only come after Next on a solved Expedition dig. Rewarded ads are always your choice and name their reward first. Remove ads and archive is bought through Google Play, removes the ads between digs for good, opens every past daily and gives the rewarded bonuses without an ad.
In the browser, the same game plays with your progress kept in this browser; the rewarded bonuses and the purchase are in the Android app.