Play free in your browser · coming to iPhone

Dig the jar.
Fill the orders.
Feed the dragon.

You've seen the ad: a jar packed with gems and rocks, and someone plucking the treasures out to fill an order. That game never existed. This is it — a cozy gem-digging puzzle where every gem and every rock is real physics, and pulling one out brings the whole pile down.

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The whole game, free in your browser · all 40 career levels · no ads · no sign-in

The verb, in your browser

This is the whole game.

One order, a satchel, and a pickaxe with a fixed number of swings. It plays by the app's real rules — including the one that makes it a puzzle instead of a grab bag: a gem with anything resting on top of it will not come out. Try one and it just shifts in place. Clear what's above it and the whole pile falls into the hole.

Order 90c

Satchel 0/7

Pickaxe 22

Earned 0c

Click a gem on the surface of the pile.

Only the surface comes out. Anything with a body resting on it is buried.
Orders pay on full sets. A gem sitting in your satchel has earned nothing yet.
Every pull costs a swing — rocks included. They pay a coin and get in the way.
A full satchel jams. Dig anything into a full bag and it is scrapped — even a gem the card wanted. Click a slot to toss one first.

The app is deeper than this: five orders on the line at once, 55 swings a shift, rare prisms a dragon wants, and a Heartstone that takes three pries to free.

How it plays

Grabbing is easy. Digging is the game.

Five orders hang on a line above the jar. Every one wants a specific set of gems, and you only get paid when a set is complete — so the jar stops being a pile of treasure and starts being a plan.

The satchel

Seven slots. Gems you dig go in the bag and stay there until they finish an order. Fill it with things nobody asked for and the next gem you pull is scrap — the pressure sits on every single tap, not on rare mistakes.

55 swings

One swing per gem or rock, and that's the whole shift. No clock, because a pile of physics settles at its own pace on its own phone — but spam the top layer and you'll run out of pickaxe before you run out of orders.

The pile answers back

Pull a stone from the middle and everything above it collapses into the gap, exposing gems that weren't reachable a second ago. Rocks pay a coin and cost a swing — sometimes clearing one is the whole move.

Orders that refill

Deliver a set and a fresh card drops onto the line in its place. A Rush order arrives with a 45-second dial and pays for the hurry. Throughput against payout is the economy of a shift.

Heartstones and geodes

Some rocks crack open into live gems. And buried deep in the biggest jars is a Heartstone — a colossal gem that takes three pries to free, then asks whether it's worth 600 coins or worth keeping.

It rings in tune

Every combo ladder is harmonised to the chord the soundtrack is actually playing, and the fanfare scales with what you actually earned. A shift that lost money never gets a celebration.

Hoardling, a small purple dragon asleep on a heap of gems and coins

The collection

Use it… or feed the dragon.

Hoardling sleeps on a ledge in the shop. When you unearth a rare prism and an order happens to want it, the game stops and asks on two labelled plates: USE IT, into your satchel toward that card, or HOARD, and Hoardling keeps it forever. You get six seconds, and if you don't answer the game answers for you — into the satchel while a card still wants it, otherwise to the dragon. A rare is never scrapped and a payout is never quietly taken from you. Only the Heartstone, the colossus buried near the bottom, is ever actually sold.

3Hoardling wakes up

7The hoard starts to sparkle

12A bigger bag on free digs

20Golden Hoardling

The hoard is permanent and it's the one thing that carries across every shift you ever dig. The bigger bag is deliberately free-digs-only — the Daily has to stay the same seven slots for everyone.

Three ways to dig

A ladder, a race, and somewhere to just play.

Career

40 levels

The mole's job ladder. Clear every order before the pickaxe dies; earn one to three stars on the swings you had left at the bell.

Identical Level N for every player
Rush orders from level 3, prisms from level 5
Stuck? A Deeper Pick buys eight more swings for one retry

Daily Dig

One shared jar

The same gems, the same rocks and the same buried prisms for everybody in the world, with a leaderboard of the day's best hauls. New jar at midnight UTC.

No account, no sign-in — a name is generated for you
Your best run of the day is the one that stands
Dug offline? The score posts next time you're online

Free Dig

A fresh jar, no stakes

A brand-new random jar whenever you want one. Practice a route, chase a personal best, or just take the lid off and make a mess.

Every run banks its coins
Where the eighth satchel slot pays off
No network calls at all

Screens

Lantern light, all the way down.

A career shift in progress: five order cards on the line, three gems in the satchel, 49 swings left on the pickaxe meter — The shift
Read the line, then dig

A prism has been unearthed and the game asks, on two labelled plates: use it on the glowing order, or hoard it for the dragon, with a countdown ring around the gem — The dilemma
Use it, or hoard it

The Golden Hoardling milestone fires as the twentieth gem joins the dragon's hoard — The hoard
Twenty gems kept forever

Level 13 cleared with three stars, eighteen swings left at the bell and 788 coins banked — The bell
Three stars, coins banked

The mole's shop listing six dig walls: Burrow Clay, Amber Seam, Frost Vein, Malachite, Rose Quartz and Deep Basalt — The shop
Six walls, all cosmetic

The Gemburrow title screen in the mole's shop, with the career path strip, today's daily dig and the hoard count — The shop room
Where every shift starts

The deal

An honest game about greed.

Gemburrow is about hoarding treasure. It would be a poor joke to build that on a slot machine, so we didn't: there is one optional purchase in the whole game, nothing you can buy changes a dig, and nothing stops you playing.

One optional purchase

The Full Burrow unlocks career levels 11–40 and the 14-day dig archive. That is the entire catalogue — no subscription, no coin pack, no starter bundle. Free digs, the Daily Dig and career levels 1–10 stay free forever.

No ads

No advertising SDK is linked into the build, so there is nothing to watch, skip, or accidentally tap.

No energy meter

Play as long as you like. Nothing recharges on a clock, and nothing asks you to come back in four hours. A Rush order does run its own 45-second countdown — that is the puzzle, not a wait.

No account

No sign-in, no email, no profile. The leaderboard names you MOLE-something and gets on with it.

Nothing you buy changes a dig

The shop sells dig walls — colour, nothing else — and the paid unlock only gates which career levels you may enter: never swings, satchel slots or jar content. The Daily has to be the same jar for everyone, so it is.

One thing leaves your phone

A Daily Dig score: a random ID made on your device, an auto-generated name and the run's numbers. Career and Free digs send nothing. The details.

Common questions

FAQ

When can I play Gemburrow?

Soon. Gemburrow is coming to iPhone and isn't on the App Store yet. If you'd like a note the day the shop opens, email support@hypersage.ai and we'll tell you at launch. You do not have to wait to play, though: the whole game runs free in your browser at hypersage.ai/gemburrow/play/, and you can add it to your home screen.

Is this the game from those gem-jar ads?

It's the game those ads were pretending to be. That jar-full-of-gems clip has run against a dozen different apps, and downloading any of them gets you something else entirely. Gemburrow is that clip built as the actual game: a jar packed with gems and rocks, real physics, and orders to fill by digging the right ones out.

Does it cost anything, and are there ads?

Gemburrow is free to play, and there is one optional in-app purchase: The Full Burrow, a single one-time unlock that opens career levels 11–40 and the 14-day dig archive. Everything else is free forever — free digs, the Daily Dig with its leaderboard and league, career levels 1–10, all 27 contracts, and the whole shop and wardrobe. That one unlock is the entire catalogue: no subscription, no coin packs, no advertising SDK and no energy meter. The coins you spend in the mole's shop are earned by digging and are not for sale. The browser version at hypersage.ai/gemburrow/play/ carries no store at all, so the whole 40-level ladder is open there.

What do coins actually do?

They bank between shifts and buy dig walls in the mole's shop — six of them, from Burrow Clay up to Deep Basalt. Those are purely cosmetic on purpose: the Daily Dig has to be the same jar and the same seven satchel slots for everybody, so nothing you can buy is allowed to change how a dig plays. Coins also pay for a Deeper Pick, which adds eight swings to one retry of a career level you're stuck on.

What is the Daily Dig?

One jar a day, identical for every player in the world — same gems, same rocks, same buried prisms — and a leaderboard of the day's best hauls. It resets at midnight UTC. Posting a score sends only a random ID made on your device, an auto-generated name like MOLE-4F2A, and the run's numbers; there is no account and no sign-in anywhere in the game.

Can I play without a connection?

Yes — Career and Free digs make no network calls at all, and your progress is stored on your phone. The Daily Dig plays offline too; only posting your score and drawing the leaderboard need a connection, and a score dug offline is queued and sent the next time the game opens online.

How long is a shift, and is there a timer?

There is no session clock, deliberately — a pile of physics takes as long as it takes to settle, and that is different on every phone, so billing you for it would be unfair. What limits a shift is the pickaxe: 55 swings, one per gem or rock you pull. Individual Rush orders do carry their own 45-second countdown, shown as a dial on the card.

Is the art hand-painted?

No — it's AI-generated, and we'd rather say so than pretend. Every gem, rock, the mole and the dragon come from an AI image model working under one painterly art direction, then get curated and repaired until the whole set holds together. The music is composed and rendered in-house by our own script — no stock art, no licensed audio.

The studio

From HyperSage

Gemburrow is built by HyperSage — an independent studio making opinionated, carefully-built apps and games. One painted art direction, physics written from scratch so a phone can hold sixty frames, and a daily jar that is provably the same for everyone. See the studio

The jar is full. Grandpa left you the shop.

The whole game is playable free in your browser right now. Gemburrow is coming to iPhone too — leave us a line and we'll tell you the day the lantern goes on.

Get notified at launch