Geology & anthropology · learned by playing
A handful of small games for 4.6 billion years of Earth — the ages and the ancestors, the grains and the groundwater, the bones and the rock, and how to read them.
Built as a study tool, and shared freely. Each game is grounded in the real record — the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the Hjulström curve, the Floridan aquifer — so the fun and the coursework are the same thing. Pick where to dig in.
The human end of the same record — bone by bone and layer by layer. Osteology and the biological profile, excavation and context, the methods that turn a trench into a chronology.
Enter → Section twoDeep time, minerals and thin sections, maps and structures, sediment, groundwater, ground that moves, and what's worth mining. Mapped to the eight ASBOG licensure domains.
Enter →Or browse everything below. A few games sit in both columns — Order of Ages runs from the Hadean straight through the hominins, and Match & Dig has a skin for each discipline.
Forensic anthropology: name the bone and side it, build a biological profile from a real skeletal inventory, and read what happened after death from the bone itself.
Play → New · evolutionClassify the primate order, watch genetic drift fix an allele across twelve populations, read diagnostic traits off the hominin record, and model why skin color tracks latitude rather than ancestry.
Play →Stack the periods, extinctions, hominins, orogenies and sea-level events oldest-to-youngest. Sequence them, match each to its period, or flip flashcards — seven decks, mixed or by theme.
Play → Idle · clickerSink an idle borehole back to the Hadean crust at 4,600 Ma. Bank research, upgrade the rig, and log every boundary you cross.
Play → PuzzleA fence diagram across three outcrops. Trace a bed using marker beds and index fossils — and spot where it pinches out or changes rock type sideways.
Play →Name the mineral in the hand and under the microscope — hardness, streak, cleavage, and the thin-section optics that give it away. Classify igneous and metamorphic rocks, and learn the formulas and silicate structures behind them.
Play → New · economic geologyOre deposits and the processes that concentrate them, a petroleum system you can build and break, coal rank, and reserves versus resources.
Play →Read a geologic map: real topographic contours and the rule of Vs, strike-and-dip notation, folds and faults from their map patterns, plus plate boundaries and seismic waves.
Play → New · engineeringEngineering geology: read a boring log, work a slope to failure, and probe Florida’s sinkholes. Then the soil data itself — phase relationships, Atterberg limits and the plasticity chart, Kozeny–Carman permeability, and whether a contaminant will actually move.
Play →Follow a grain from outcrop to basin. The Hjulström curve, the Goldich series, Folk & Ward statistics on a real distribution, roundness against sphericity — and twelve sedimentary structures with the geometry that tells you the flow, the environment, and which way was up.
Play → New · quantitativeGeomorphology by calculation. Read the hypsometric curve, balance an isostatic root, work out why ocean depth follows the square root of seafloor age, date a fault scarp from how far it has slumped, and run back-of-the-envelope problems with the units carried.
Play → New · tectonicHow mountains are pushed up and plates bend. Thicken the crust and carve valleys to raise the peaks, link faults and test them against Coulomb failure, count earthquakes in a drowned-forest creek bank, date rockfalls with lichens, lift a flight of marine terraces, and bend a plate to find its bulge.
Play → SimulationWhy three regions with wildly different rainfall all ended up pumping, then where a raindrop actually goes — recharge is the leftover after evapotranspiration and runoff take their cut. Then porosity, Darcy’s law, and a well field you can over-pump until the spring runs dry.
Play → New · surface waterGauge a stream strip by strip, read a rating curve into the part nobody measured, watch a city turn a storm into a flash flood, and find out what a “100-year flood” actually means for a 30-year mortgage.
Play →A match-three you can skin for minerals or dig-site finds. Line up four to forge the geologist's rock hammer or the archaeologist's trowel.
Play → ArcadeHop cooling crust rafts across the Hadean magma ocean, pocket ancient zircons, and dodge the bombardment — survive to the first real rock.
Play →These games began as one student's way to remember the record in relation to itself — how the periods, sediments, water, and ancestors all connect — instead of memorizing a scale and hoping. If they help you too, that's the whole idea. Colors throughout follow the ICS chart, so a hue is always a clue.