Thousand Year Old Campfire
or
Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite
in Mammoth Cave National Park, an Excavation

I don't know if I know how to explain this, but I must try.

You are buying a game. The game is disguised as a particular sort of regionally produced archaeology journal which I used to see for sale in state parks when I was a youth.

In this solo game you are creating the results of an excavation of a cave mouth which has been a frequently used campsite for a thousand or more years. You do this backwards, building up history from the bedrock up.

You will roll a die and add dirt, building the cave floor upwards over time. At some points there will be archaeological finds 'uncovered'; you will operate a flowchart to learn about that find and how it came to be there. I am very proud of these flowchartssome of them are, maybe, the best art I've ever made.

A flow chart might look like this:

You operate the flowchart and then add things to your strata schematic. In this case you would draw in beads and follow the procedure for making a long-dead campfire.

A finished strata chart might look like this:

I am inordinately happy with this game and am unable to do it justice here. Maybe I can rewrite this later and do better?