Digseum is a treat for anyone who's finished their Animal Crossing museumAnd a bit about trowel envy.Image credit: Rat Monthly Feature by Christian Donlan Contributing Editor Published on Jan. 20, 2025 Digseum is a new clicker game - one of those games where you click madly on things while the numbers go up - that Steam recommended to me last week. The timing was perfect. I'd just finished installing the final art work in my Animal Crossing museum, and here was a brand new museum to fill with trinkets and doodads pulled from the earth.DigseumPublisher: Rat MonthlyDeveloper: Rat MonthlyPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC.Pulling trinkets and doodads from the earth is very much what Digseum is about. So far, it's very simple and pleasant going. You have a museum, and the more exhibits you have means the more visitors you have, which means the more money you get flowing in. You find things to exhibit by clicking on grids of earth and uncovering the stuff under the surface. You're hemmed in by stamina, which means you can only swing your pickaxe so many times in one session, so finding buried objects in even a small grid quickly becomes a bit like a game of Battleships. You learn to punch speculative holes all over the earth in the hope of finding something that glints.Then the loop kicks in. Find multiples of the same exhibit and it levels up, which means more visitors, which means more money. That money, meanwhile, can be spent on improving stamina, how many holes your pick opens with a single swing, and how easily it bites into the earth. You can also pay for marketing, which improves visitor flow, and you can buy new plots to dig in, which means new exhibits etc etc. Digseum. | Image credit: Rat MonthlyPretty soon all the numbers are going up, and everything you spend money on just makes the numbers go up faster. It's elegant, as clickers tend to be, but it's also more than elegant. By chucking in the Battleships-style digs, players get a better sense of the role that luck plays, I think.But it also does more than that. Silly as it all is, the digs really deliver on the fantasy of being an archaeologist or a treasure-hunter, swinging your pick and maybe finding something cool. My sister trained as an archaeologist years ago and talked with real fondness about the moment you saw something in the earth you had just disturbed. She said the thing she liked to dig up the least was teeth - an animal jaw would give her nightmares for days. And she said archaeologists are often so tightly packed into their intellectual worlds they develop all these strange fascinations, like trowel envy. Trowel envy related to how much you envy a more experienced archaeologist whose excavation trowel is more thoroughly worn down than yours.I'll be honest: I haven't thought of trowel envy in many years. But that's just one of the delights of this compact and ingenious clicker. If you have a few minutes to burn, or if like me you're mourning a recently completing Animal Crossing museum, maybe give it a look.Code for Digseum was purchased by the author.