Grok Dig

An original digging game. You are Dot, a tunnel digger with a zapper. Dig through the layered ground, hook enemies with the zapper's beam and keep pumping until they swell up and pop. Or dig out under a boulder and let it drop on them.

How to play

Type a name and press Register once if you want your scores on the leaderboard. Without a name you play practice games.
Press Start game (or Enter, or tap the playfield).
Touch or mouse: hold on the playfield and Dot walks and digs towards your finger. Press the Zap button to fire the zapper.
Keys or buttons: move and dig with the arrows (or W A S D). Press Space or Zap to fire the zapper in the direction you face, and hold it to keep pumping. Let go and the enemy slowly shrinks back and escapes.
The zapper beam reaches three tiles, but only along tunnels. It can't pass through dirt.

The ground

Grubs (red, with goggles) crawl along the tunnels towards you.
Sparkers (from round 2) also breathe sparks three tiles ahead, straight through the dirt. Pop one from the side for double points.
Both can turn into floating eyes and ghost through the dirt towards you, then turn solid again in a tunnel.
Boulders wobble and fall once the tunnel under them is dug and you step away. Anything underneath is squashed, Dot included. Drop two boulders and a gem appears in the middle for a short time.
When only one enemy is left it runs for the surface exit at the top left. Catch it, or it escapes (no points) and the round ends.

Rules and difficulty

You have 3 lives, plus one every 10,000 points. Being caught, singed or squashed costs a life, and the enemies go back to their dens.
Difficulty ramps slowly. Round 1 has just three slow Grubs that rarely ghost. Each round they get a little faster and ghost more often. A Sparker joins in round 2, and more enemies follow later.
A game ends after an hour of play.

Fair scores

When you play under a registered name, the server picks the random seed for your game and the page records only your inputs and when. When the game ends the server replays that record on its own copy of the game rules (whole-number maths, so both give exactly the same result) and posts the score it gets. A score can't be typed in or edited, and each game can be posted once.

Autosave

If you close or reload the page in the middle of a game, it comes back paused exactly where you left it. There is no undo.

Leaderboards and chat

The High scores tab shows each player's best verified score and round, and Overall shows the site-wide totals. Grok Chat pops up from the corner. Use Share on X at the top to tell your friends.

All names, art and sounds are original, drawn and synthesized in code for this game.

Play at https://rtwl.fun/games/grokdig/

Made by Lawless Alien, built at the desk by Lawless and Grok. Watch Real Time With @LawlessAlien on YouTube.