Special Interest
DigQuest
Excavate ancient sites layer by layer, analyze artifacts with real archaeological methods, and reconstruct the stories of lost civilizations — from Mesopotamia to the Maya.
▶ Play it nowBuilt for sittings of about 20 minutes on the screen. That is our design budget, not a measurement.
Meet your mentor
Every Spark & Anvil app has a friendly mentor character that demonstrates, asks, and patiently scaffolds learning. On-device AI personalizes the mentor's responses to your kid's progress — never connecting to a server, never collecting data.
Mentored by Trowel
#FFA726 DigQuest turns you into an archaeologist! Excavate ancient dig sites grid by grid, analyze mysterious artifacts in your lab, and piece together the stories of lost civilizations. Every discovery is a clue that helps you understand how ancient people lived, worked, and played.
Characters who teach
Meet the cast
Each character in DigQuest is one part of archaeology: reading the layers, sorting finds, dating them, keeping to what people actually left behind, and asking whose story it is to tell, plus conservation, careful rebuilding, everyday objects, leaving some ground untouched, and what an empty spot can mean. Trowel, the mentor, keeps the work respectful.
Layer
Stratigraphic context — where in the layered earth? (vertical chronology, context integrity)
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Shape
Artifact-typological analysis — what family of object? (comparative typology, craft traditions)
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Past
Dating techniques — when by which method? (dates as ranges with confidence intervals)
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Keep
Cultural-context inference — keep-what-people-said, not invent-what-they-must-have-meant
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Ask
Community-partnership ethics — whose story is this and who gets to tell it? (NAGPRA + UNDRIP-grounded, descendant-community partnership)
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Grit
Conservation — keep it, don't fix it; a fragile find is stabilized gently, never scrubbed shiny or restored into something it never was
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Join
Reconstruction — fit the pieces you have, never invent the ones you don't; a rebuilt pot shows its gaps honestly
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Sherd
The ordinary object — the broken cooking pot tells you more than the gold crown; how people lived is written in humble everyday things
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Spare
Leave it — you don't dig everything; some of the site stays untouched for future diggers, and some because the people it belongs to want it left
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Void
Absence — what isn't there can mean three things; never read a gap as a fact too quickly
Read chapter →
Browse all chapters → · What's distributed-narrative methodology? →
What's inside
Excavation
Carefully dig through layers of earth grid by grid. Different soil layers come from different time periods. Go slowly -- rushing can damage artifacts! Use the r
Artifact Lab
Bring your finds to the lab for analysis. Clean them, identify what they are, figure out how old they are using dating methods, and catalog them. Some broken ar
Civilization Stories
As you find more artifacts from the same civilization, you unlock their story. Learn about 12 different ancient cultures and how they lived.
Field Journal
Sketch your artifacts, write notes about your discoveries, and record your theories. Great archaeologists always keep detailed notes!
Mentored by Trowel — on-device AI, no data leaves the device.
How DigQuest handles your kid's data
- ✅ All progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on the device
- ✅ No analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs
- ✅ Free — no ads, no in-app purchases
- ✅ No personal information collected from children — in line with COPPA (updated by the 2026 FTC amendments)
- ✅ No chat with strangers — play-together rooms use a short code and preset emotes, never typed messages
DigQuest runs on ForgeKit — the open-source Swift Package Manager framework that powers every Spark & Anvil app. ForgeKit ensures consistent accessibility, COPPA compliance, and design language across the portfolio, so your kid's progress and preferences feel coherent across every app they touch.
Coming to the App Store
DigQuest is in active development. Email us to hear when it ships — no marketing, no spam, just a one-shot launch announcement.
Email me at launch
