This is a nice minesweeper-esque game. I was confused by how the distance the dowsing rod shows is measured. It seemed inconsistent. Even in the screenshots you have posted you can see cases where two tiles that are the same distance from the nearest artifact have different values.
Viewing post in MicroArchaeology jam comments
Yeah, I think I must have been confusing distance to nearest artifact with count of adjacent artifacts. There was a moment in this last playthrough where I looked at a tile that was next to both an exposed artifact and a location where I knew there was an unexposed artifact and I went "how is that possible?" But obviously it is except that my brain keeps trying to make the number be a count.
Yeah, I definitely understand the confusion. One of my play testers experienced the same thing. The game feels almost like minesweeper (in fact I even called it 'anti-minesweeper' during my planning), but unlike minesweeper the number does not mean adjacent 'mines'. Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!