Mine Mogul

Mine Mogul is an idle mining company drawn as a cutaway hillside. Above the ground line there is grass, pines, a winding house with smoke coming out of it and a headframe whose wheel turns whenever the cage is moving. Below it the rock is layered in bands you can read at a glance, and your workings spread down through them one gallery at a time. Tap anywhere in the rock and a dig lands where you touched, with dust, ore chips and a number that floats up.

Ten things can be put down the mine, from a pit lad with a lamp and a bucket to a mole machine that goes down and does not come up, and every tenth, twenty-fifth, fiftieth and hundredth one of a kind doubles what that kind brings up. Sinking the shaft is the other half of it: each new section costs more than the last, puts another lit gallery on the screen with miners, rails and a cart rolling between the face and the shaft, and every eight sections takes you into a richer seam. A quarter of everything raised waits on a stockpile at the pithead, and the market price of all six ores drifts up and down on its own, so there is a good moment to sell and a bad one.

Twenty-four milestone upgrades sit behind their own tab — steel picks, carbide lamps, cart grease, an assay office, blast powder, survey maps, your own smelter — each with a drawn badge and a plain sentence saying what it does. The mine keeps working for up to eight hours while the tab is closed and a card tells you what the night shift raised. When a run has gone as far as it usefully can, stake a new claim: the shaft, the crew and the money go, and you keep deeds that make every mine after it richer, plus four permanent perks to spend them on. It saves itself to your browser, runs on a finger, a mouse or the keyboard, and is happy to be left alone to relax for an afternoon.