Recreate famous geological events and places across the Earth. Shape a basin over deep time, change it one age at a time, then read about every layer that was deposited.
Every card changes the sea, the climate or the land, and the simulation works out what that does to the basin. Nothing is scripted. The same card can have different effects depending on the context.
Water
Dry
Cold
Warm
Life
Earth
Fire
Quiet
Coconino Sandstone
The Rare Cards
Somewhere in every map, a gold card turns up beside the hand. You have three ages to play it. If you let it go, it won't come back. Each one lays a layer that geologists use to match up rocks around the world.
Plate II Age 9 in Canyon Country: a rare card turns up
Plate III The meteorite lands and forms a crater in the shelf
Canyon Country
Impact breccia
Meteor Crater, Arizona
Glacial Lake
Welded tuff
The Bishop Tuff, California
A Chalky Sea
Boundary clay
Stevns Klint, Denmark
Coal Swamp
Trees buried standing
Joggins, Nova Scotia
Volcanic Island
Landslide rubble
The Nuuanu slide, Hawaii
Salt Basin
Marl on salt
The Trubi marl, Sicily
Island Arc
Tsunami sand
Cascadia, January 1700
Eight more in the full game
The Rift
Footprints in ash
Laetoli, Tanzania
The Ridge
Hyaloclastite
Surtsey, Iceland, 1963
Early Earth
Cap carbonate
The Flinders Ranges, Australia
The Burgess Shale
Megabreccia
The Cathedral Escarpment, Canada
Dinosaur Badlands
Impact spherules
Tanis, North Dakota
Gold Country
Welded tuff
Nevada, 40 million years ago
Proven Reserves
Red clay
Walvis Ridge, 56 million years ago
The Collision
Leucogranite
Manaslu and Makalu, Himalaya
Hermit Shale
The Rules
The simulation follows the same rules that geologists have developed to make sense of real rocks, and you will pick them up as they did, by watching sediment pile up, become rocks, and asking why.
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Plate IV A section through Canyon Country after fifteen ages. The rock types are shown in the patterns geologists use
Dune sandstone. Wind piled the sand into dunes during a dry spell forming the sloping cross-beds as evidence.
Red mudstone. Floodplain mud, rusted red while it lay open to the air.
Evaporite. A shallow lagoon that dried away and left salt behind.
Limestone with fossil shells. Warm, clear shallows with lots of lively creatures.
Sandstone with ripple marks. A sandy shore, rippled by waves.
Shale. Mud that settled out in deeper, quieter water.
Some more concepts
Rivers sort their sediment. They drop gravel by the mountains, sand at the shore and mud offshore.
Warm, clear shallows grow limestone. Too much mud and the fragile life can't keep up.
A rising sea stacks sand, then mud, then lime. The Grand Canyon's Tonto Group is that sequence. Can you rebuild it?
Harder rock resists erosion while soft rock wears away. Limestone and sandstone hold up steps and cliffs, while shale and salt weather away first.
Earthquakes break rocks. A fault drops one side down a sloping plane, causing an underwater avalanche to deposit a graded bed.
Tap any layer to read about it. This one isn't lithified yet.
Supai Group
Burial, heat and pressure
Buried deep enough, loose sediment lithifies into rock. As it gets deeper and hotter, the rock goes through changes. Rocks next to magma are baked. A warm glow marks rock that is still changing. In a trench, where one plate dives under another, rock is squeezed hard but doesn't get as hot, so what happens then?
The chains shown: peat is buried into coal, then heated into anthracite and graphite. Shale heats into slate, then schist, then gneiss. In a trench, sediment scraped off the sinking plate shears into mélange, is squeezed into blueschist, and deeper still becomes eclogite. Limestone heats into marble. Sandstone heats into quartzite. Mudstone beside magma bakes into hornfels.
Surprise Canyon Formation
The End of a Record
Plate V Twenty-four ages in Canyon Country, saved as a postcard
You can finish a map at age 10, and at age 24 the game ends. The view pulls back over the whole section, with the oldest rock at the bottom and youngest on top (usually).
You can keep it as a postcard for your cabinet.
Open the postcard again any time to explore the section. Pan across it, read about its layers and cut the specimens you missed.
Redwall Limestone
The Places
Each location has its own bedrock, climate, deck of cards, and ten challenges from the museum, from easy to hard. Finish a place to unlock the next one.
No. 1 · Schist basement
Canyon Country
A warm sea meets a dry red land
A warm sea laps against a dry, red land. Sand, shale and limestone stack up here like the layers of the Grand Canyon.
Rebuild the Tonto Group
Red beds
The Grand Canyon wall
No. 2 · Granite basement
Glacial Lake
A cold lake in a granite basin
A deep, cold lake in a basin of granite, fed by glaciers. Faults drop the floor of the basin, and a volcano erupts to the north.
Stones from the ice
The burning cloud
A table mountain
No. 3 · Slate basement
A Chalky Sea
Deep, warm and calm
A warm, deep, quiet sea far from any mountains. Plankton rain slowly onto the floor.
White cliffs
Dust on the chalk
The end of an era
No. 4 · Granite basement
Coal Swamp
Steamy lowlands by a restless sea
Steamy lowlands where forests grow right down to the water as sea levels rise and fall.
A seam worth mining
Trees still standing
Two cyclothems
No. 5 · Basalt basement
Volcanic Island
Fire under a tropical sea
A young volcano rising out of a warm sea, slowly sinking as it cools, which is how coral atolls begin.
Pillows from the deep
Surtsey
An atoll
No. 6 · Granite basement
Salt Basin
A hot sea cut off from the ocean
A hot basin walled off from the ocean by a rocky sill. Seawater spills in over the sill and dries away.
A salt mine
The sea breaks in
The Zechstein
No. 7 · Basalt basement
Island Arc
Where one plate dives under another
A chain of volcanoes over a plate that dives into a deep trench, with a young sea opening behind them, like the Marianas. Thrust faults stack old rock on young, and rock dragged down the trench is squeezed cold into blueschist.
Blue rocks from the trench
A stack of thrusts
From the roots of the trench
Sandbox
You have access to every card, the rare ones included, for up to a hundred ages, with dials for the sea and the climate. Start on any landscape and basement rock of your choice.
Temple Butte Formation
The Full Game
Follow the plates from a continent tearing apart to two continents meeting, go back to early Earth, and hunt for gold in Northern Nevada and oil in the North Sea. Each location has its own way of working, finds that turn up nowhere else, new age cards, a rare card and ten more challenges. The sandbox is expanded with the additional cards.
No. 8 · Gneiss basement
The Rift
Where a continent tears apart
East Africa is splitting in two. The rift floor drops between high mountains, lakes pool in its valleys, and a volcano erupts unique lava.
No. 9 · Basalt basement
The Ridge
Where new sea floor is born
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where two plates pull apart and lava wells up between them. In Iceland the ridge rises out of the sea.
No. 10 · Gneiss basement
Early Earth
Before the air had oxygen
2.5 billion years ago, under an orange sky with no oxygen in it. Mats of microbes in the shallows start producing a new byproduct, oxygen.
No. 11 · Slate basement
The Burgess Shale
Where soft bodies turned to rock
An undersea reef cliff in the Canadian Rockies, 508 million years ago. Mudflows buried strange animals so fast their soft parts were preserved.
No. 12 · Granite basement
Dinosaur Badlands
The last days of the dinosaurs
Montana, 66 million years ago. Rivers wander over a wet plain by an inland sea and bury dinosaur bones. Something falls from the sky.
No. 13 · Schist basement
Gold Country
Tons of microscopic gold
Northern Nevada's high desert. Hot water rising up faults left gold too fine to see in limestone sealed under old sea floor. Discovered in 1961.
No. 14 · Granite basement
Proven Reserves
The right rocks make oil
The North Sea basin, over a layer of old salt. Buried plankton-rich mud cooks into oil, which rises through sandstone until shale or salt traps it.
No. 15 · Schist basement
The Collision
Where two continents meet
India drives north into Asia. The ocean between them closes, the crust stacks up, and sea-floor limestone rises to the top of the world.
Muav Limestone
Collecting
Forty-seven rocks and eleven sedimentary structures to find, from ripple marks to blueschist. The full game brings it to seventy-one rocks and nineteen structures.
Rub the slab to polish it.
Specimens
Cut a hand sample from any layer and rub the dust away. Some hide a fossil shell, a geode or a selenite crystal. You can keep five from each map for your collection.
The field journal
Every rock and structure you find gets a page in the journal. It explains how it forms, adds a field note, and records where you first found it.
The cabinet
Keep your specimens and postcards organized.
Bright Angel Shale
Tapeats Sandstone · the Great Unconformity
Vishnu Schist · about 1.7 billion years old
Coming soon
On Steam for macOS and Windows, and on the App Store and Google Play.
