Tap! Dig! My Museum!

It’s difficult to overstate just how much of Tap! Dig! My Museum! is in its title. In this free mobile idler, you play as an aspiring dinosaur archaeologist and newfound owner of a museum in disrepair. By enticing patrons to your museum, you collect the coins they drop as they react to your dinosaurs. In turn, you invest your cash into archaeological digs — where you tap away at sand to uncover hidden bones — and upgrades which make said digs easier. The more dinosaurs you complete, the more people come flooding in to see them, which in turn leads to more money, which in turn leads to more dinosaurs. You get the idea.

Tap! Dig! My Museum! is a perfect free game in the sense that it never artificially handicaps the player’s progress. If you want to keep unearthing dinosaur fossils, nobody’s stopping you. Mandatory ads are never longer than 15 seconds, and ads that grant bonuses (like a school bus that brings a swarm of visitors to boost your income) are never longer than 30. As of version 1.3.0 (which added a second floor to the museum and oceanic dinos!), the whole experience only took about 18 hours to complete — ads and plenty of AFK coin collecting included. After being burned by many a “free-to-play” mobile game, it was nice to actually finish one fair and square.

There is exactly one interesting wrinkle that shook up gameplay in what was otherwise an enjoyable but repetitive experience. Occasionally, while on a dig, I’d uncover a bone fragment that didn’t belong to the dinosaur I was excavating. These remained elusive until finding more across other dig sites, as Tap! Dig! My Museum! began to drop subtle clues about where I could find others. I soon found myself flipping through the in-game dinosaur book with newfound importance, trying to track down mysterious new creatures. In those moments, even if it was in a cartoonish, silly kind of way, I felt like I was solving a pre-historic mystery. And, after all, that’s what this is all about.