Dino Dig

Dino Dig is a five-part dinosaur game for children. You pick a dinosaur and a difficulty, and then you do what a real palaeontologist does, in the same order: find the bones, work out where they go, and only then decide what the animal looked like. The fifth part is the one no palaeontologist gets: the dinosaur you painted stands up and stays yours. Everything runs in the browser — there is no sign-up, no ads, nothing is uploaded, and a dig you leave half-finished is saved on your own device so you can come back to it. Fullscreen, from the button at the top of every stage, hands the whole display to the picture and the tray or paint box beside it, and holds the page still so a small hand cannot scroll it away; Escape or the Exit button brings the page back.

Stage 1 — the dig site

The bones start buried under a square of dirt, scattered and jumbled the way they would actually be found rather than laid out in the shape of an animal. Brushing sweeps the dirt away a patch at a time; on the harder settings the dirt is layered, so the same patch needs several passes before anything shows through. A bone lifts out on its own once about seventy per cent of it is uncovered, which means you never have to hunt for the last few specks around an edge. If digging stops being the fun part, Uncover it all clears the site in one go and hands you everything.

Stage 2 — putting it together

Everything you found goes into a tray at the bottom of the screen. Drag a piece onto the skeleton and let go: if it is close enough to where it belongs, it snaps into place. How close is “close enough” is the main thing difficulty changes. On the hardest setting the pieces also come out of the ground turned around, and have to be rotated back with the Turn button before they will sit down — pieces are always buried at an angle you can undo exactly, so there is never a piece that cannot be straightened.

Stages 3 and 4 — painting

Once the skeleton is standing you paint it, and then you paint the living animal built on the same outline. There are three tools. Fill is the default and the easiest on a touchscreen: tap a bone or a body part and the whole of it fills in. Brush paints freehand but stays inside whichever part you started on, so a wobbly hand cannot spill over into the next bone. Scribble removes that guard rail and paints anywhere.

The paint box has seventeen flat colours and one that is not flat. The rainbow swatch paints a whole spectrum at once: tap a bone with it and the colours run from one end of that bone to the other, or brush with it and the colour changes as your finger travels. It is deliberately not realistic, because a dinosaur's real colours are one of the things nobody knows, and a child painting a purple-and-yellow Stegosaurus is no more wrong than the brown one in an old book.

Stage 5 — playtime

Once the animal is painted it comes out of the picture and into a meadow, still wearing the colours it was given, and there are three things to do with it. Fetch: tap anywhere in the meadow and the ball lands there, and the dinosaur walks over, picks it up and brings it back — as far or as near as you like, and it never gets bored. Feed: there is a tray of six things to eat, and half of them are wrong. Dance: four dances to choose from, including a spin, and the dinosaur keeps going until it is told to stop.

Feeding is the part that teaches something. Every dinosaur here has a diet, and it is the diet the real animal had: Tyrannosaurus eats the drumstick, the fish and the big bone, and turns away from the fern. Stegosaurus and Triceratops do exactly the opposite. Getting it wrong costs nothing — the dinosaur sniffs, backs off, and tells you what it does eat — so the tray is somewhere to find out rather than somewhere to be marked. The ticks on the tray remember what it has eaten.

What the difficulty levels change

The three settings move four things together rather than just one, so each is a genuinely different game rather than the same game slowed down:

• How many bones there are. Hatchling gives you seven or eight big pieces — a skull, a neck, a spine, the ribs as one unit. Junior splits those into fourteen to seventeen. Palaeontologist breaks them all the way down to twenty-two to twenty-six individual bones, ribs and toes included.
• How fussy the fitting is. Hatchling accepts a bone dropped roughly in the right area; Palaeontologist wants it close, and the right way up.
• Whether there are decoys. Junior buries a few plain rocks. Palaeontologist adds bones belonging to one of the other dinosaurs, which will not fit anywhere and have to be recognised and thrown on the rock pile.
• How much digging there is. Deeper dirt, a bigger site to sweep, and no outlines showing where anything is. Hatchling marks the buried shapes for you; the other two do not.

The dinosaurs

There are three to dig up: Tyrannosaurus, with the enormous head and the arms that famously could not reach it; Stegosaurus, whose back plates and tail spikes are separate pieces to find; and Triceratops, whose skull is really four things — a frill, a face, a beak and three horns. The skeletons are stylised rather than scientific: proportions are pushed so the three are easy to tell apart, and the bones are simplified into shapes small hands can grab.