Caved

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Dig up the buried gems from number clues without hitting a skull.

Play Caved

on gocomics.com

Caved board: dark tiles with blue and green number clues, a gold gem uncovered and a skull among the covered purple tiles

Caved is a Puzzle Society logic puzzle in the spirit of Minesweeper: number clues on the uncovered squares tell you what lies hidden around them, and you use them to dig up a cache of gems while leaving the hidden skulls buried. A new puzzle comes each day on GoComics, included with a GoComics subscription.

About Caved

Caved is one of the Puzzle Society games from Andrews McMeel Universal, the syndicate behind GoComics, and is played on the GoComics puzzle pages. Its own description calls it a riff on the classic Minesweeper logic game: your aim is to unearth a cache of buried gems, using the clues as your map, while hidden skulls lurk among the tiles.

The game was built for the Puzzle Society by the designer Ryan Kubik, who describes it as a reworking of an earlier Minesweeper jam game of his, made more approachable for a daily puzzle format, with a level generator the Puzzle Society's editors use to set its puzzles.

Each day brings one new grid, the same for every player. Uncovered squares show numbers counting what is hidden next to them; from those you work out which covered tiles are safe to dig and which hide a skull. Like the best Minesweeper variants it rewards careful reading of overlapping clues rather than lucky clicks.

Caved is part of the GoComics subscription (listed at $2.99 a month on its page), which also opens the other Puzzle Society games such as Lexigo, Hex 10 and the Universal Crossword. It suits players who like Minesweeper but want a single hand-set daily board instead of endless random fields.

How to play Caved

Open Caved on the GoComics puzzles page and sign in with a GoComics subscription.
Read the numbers on the uncovered squares: each counts what is hidden on the tiles around it.
Dig the covered tiles the clues prove are safe, uncovering more numbers and the buried gems.
Leave the tiles that must hide a skull untouched, and keep going until every gem is found.

Screenshots

Caved press art: a tilted grid of number clues with one gem found and a skull hidden among the covered tiles

Tips

Start where a number already touches as many covered tiles as its count: those can be settled at once.
Compare two neighbouring clues: the tiles one sees and the other does not often decide the next safe dig.
Do not guess while a clue somewhere on the board still tells you something.