Minus Tide

HE LEFT ME EIGHT BOXES OF PAPER
AND A SET OF INSTRUCTIONS.

My great-uncle died in December. I met him exactly once, when I was eleven, and it rained the whole week.

I have read his instructions forty times now and I still can't tell whether they're a gift.

There's something buried on the Bight. Not a chest — nobody buries a chest. It's paper, and it's worth more than a chest, and he spent fifty years proving it exists without ever once putting his hand on it.

Twice he got close enough to be certain. Twice he stopped.

You do not need boots. You need to read, you need to be willing to do arithmetic, and you need to accept that every document in these boxes is wrong about something.

He left you a chain. Seven links.

It starts in the basement corridor of the county records building, with a door at the end of it.

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✦ WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO

You read a dead surveyor's archive — plats, tide tables, a lighthouse keeper's log, probate inventories, a church burial register, an 1893 quitclaim deed with a farmer's X on it — and you work out where the next cache is. Then you type your answer into a field survey form, and the form tells you whether you are right.

• Three sources give three different years for when the lighthouse was built. Only one of them describes a lamp actually burning.
• An 1892 bearing was taken by the needle, and magnetic north on this coast was twenty-one degrees off true. Correct it, or you will walk into the wrong field.
• The cache sits in a void under a tide gate sill at −0.9 feet. Find the one morning in June when the tide goes low enough in daylight. There is exactly one, and the biggest minus tide of the month misses it by nine minutes.
• A headstone has lost the year. A newspaper counts backwards from the wrong Friday. The priest who buried her wrote it down correctly.

Then there is the seventh link, which is not arithmetic, because by then you will know what the paper actually proves and who is still standing on it.

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✦ FEATURES

• Thirty-seven documents in eight boxes, unlocking as you solve — all of them rendered as paper, not as web pages, and aged accordingly: a 2026 printout is clean, an 1893 deed that spent eighty-two years in a hole under a tide gate is not
• A live map of the bay that fills in as you work: the light, the 1892 bearing, the tide gate, the section, the graveyard, and finally the sixty-two acres themselves
• Six maps and technical drawings — a quad sheet, the tide gate in section with the datums marked, an old chart of the beeswax finds, a cemetery plot plan, and the plat of what stands on the stolen ground today
• Seven puzzles that a careful person can solve with a pencil. No moon logic, no pixel hunting, no outside research
• Wrong answers are the teaching surface. Most return a specific diagnosis — "you subtracted the declination instead of adding it" — rather than a buzzer
• A three-tier hint ladder on every link: a nudge, then the method, then the answer outright. Using them is not cheating
• Raking light. Hold a lamp flat to a scraped page and the erased words throw a shadow. Two documents in this archive are hiding something no amount of squinting will show you otherwise
• Documents that change once you know more. A line that means nothing on a first pass gets a margin note once you have the fact that makes it matter
• A case file that keeps every fact you have proved, so you never have to hold six numbers in your head
• Take notes on anything. Select a line and it is quoted into the margin — and your notes follow you to the form where you type the answer
• Two people write to you. Answer them honestly, answer them carefully, or leave them unanswered — and find out at the end which of those you did
• Decide what you are willing to file. Your single best piece of evidence is stolen property, and everybody involved already knows it
• An optional eighth thread. A struck-through, blacked-out name on a deed that the main chain never makes you care about — unless you go looking
• Name a contradiction. Pick two documents that cannot both be true and the archive tells you why. Proves nothing. That's rather the point
• Put a hundred and thirty-three years in order. Twelve events, one honest survey and one fraud six months apart by the same man
• Endings that remember what you did, not just what you chose — who you wrote back to, what you were willing to file, whether you went looking for the loose end

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✦ WHAT'S REAL

Sorrel Bight and everyone in it are invented. The beeswax is not.

Refined wax and Kangxi porcelain really do wash out of the Nehalem sand from a Manila galleon lost on this coast in the 1690s, and people really have been digging that mountain for buried Spanish treasure for over a century. So are the tools: easterly declination, sixty-six-foot chains, minus tides, township-range-section, and the way a recorded instrument turns a theft into a fact that pays taxes for a hundred and thirty years.

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⚠ CONTENT NOTE

No horror, no jump scares. Themes of historical fraud, dispossession, the 1918 influenza epidemic, and inherited complicity. One reference to Indigenous dispossession, which the game does not pretend to resolve.

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Inspired by Her Story, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, and every armchair treasure hunt that was really about reading carefully.

Correct your bearings. Check the sunrise column. Believe the register over the stone.