A match-three journey down the Nile.
A match-three puzzle game. Swap the amulets to gild each floor before your moves run out.
From the journal of a journey down the Nile. We set out from Memphis with a chest of amulets and a map drawn in a hurry, and sailed, by fits and starts, all the way to Alexandria. At every stop the old floors lay grey and dull, until we set the amulets three in a row; then, as if it had only been waiting to be asked, the stone turned to gold beneath them.
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▶ Play
The board as the game draws it. The game opens when you press Play.
A chamber at Giza
Inside the Great Pyramid of Khufu we climbed a steep, low passage towards the King’s Chamber, bent nearly double. Then all at once the roof leapt away above us; the Grand Gallery is nearly nine metres high and almost fifty metres long, its walls stepping inwards towards the roof like a staircase turned on its side.
The white walls of Ptah
We set out from Memphis, where Upper and Lower Egypt meet. Tradition holds that King Menes founded the city around 3100 BCE and for much of the Old Kingdom the kings ruled from here; its patron was Ptah, protector of craftsmen. A fitting God, we thought, to see off a party of travellers with a chest full of amulets!
Imhotep’s staircase to the sky
At Saqqara the Step Pyramid of King Djoser rose above us in six great steps, set there around 2650 BCE; why, nothing so large had ever been built of cut stone before it! Its architect, Imhotep, was so admired that later Egyptians came to worship him as a God of wisdom and healing. Having stood beneath his work, we could hardly blame them.
The house of Khufu
At Giza we gazed up at the Great Pyramid of Khufu. It once stood about 146 metres tall and for nearly four thousand years nothing built by human hands stood taller; that is, until the spire of Lincoln Cathedral rose in England, around 1311. Roughly 2.3 million blocks of stone went into it, a number we must admit we did not try to verify.
The garden of Sobek
We turned west from the Nile into the Faiyum, a green basin watered by a channel called the Bahr Yussef. Its people honoured Sobek, the crocodile God, so devotedly that Greek visitors named their chief town Crocodilopolis. A name like that does little to calm the nerves and we kept well back from the water’s edge.
City of the sun disk
At Amarna we walked among the ruins of the capital Akhenaten built to worship the Aten, the disk of the sun. It was not to last; soon after his death the city was abandoned. In 1912 archaeologists found the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti here, left behind, of all places, in a sculptor’s workshop.
Resting place of Osiris
We came next to Abydos, sacred to Osiris, Lord of the dead. Pilgrims came here for His festival and many left a stone tablet behind, asking to share in the God’s rebirth. In the temple of Seti I we found his list of the kings who came before him, name after name, as neat as a ledger; yet a few are missing, Hatshepsut and Akhenaten among them. Forgotten? Hardly. They were, it seems, left out on purpose.
A forest of stone columns
Karnak was enlarged over some two thousand years in honour of the God Amun, one king after another adding something of his own, as though none of them could bear to be outdone. We lost our way in its Great Hypostyle Hall among 134 massive columns (the tallest rise about 21 metres) and were not sorry in the least.
Temple of the woman king
Beneath the cliffs of Deir el-Bahari rise the terraces of Hatshepsut’s temple. She ruled Egypt as pharaoh and was often shown wearing the king’s ceremonial beard; a queen, it seems, who meant to be taken seriously. Her walls tell of an expedition to the distant land of Punt, which came home with living incense trees. How they kept them alive on the voyage, we could only wonder.
Where the pharaohs sleep
We came up into this dry valley at dawn. For about five hundred years the kings of the New Kingdom were buried here, in tombs cut deep into the rock, under the watch of Anubis, the jackal-headed God of embalming. When Howard Carter opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, a figure of Him still lay on a gilded shrine at the door of the treasury; He had kept His watch for more than three thousand years and kept it well.
The pearl of the Nile
At Philae we landed at the temple of Isis, one of the last places where the old Gods were worshipped. Here, in 394 CE, someone carved the last hieroglyphic inscription we know of, after more than three and a half thousand years of the script. Imagine being the last! In the 1970s the whole temple was taken apart stone by stone and raised again on a nearby island, out of reach of the flood waters.
Four giants in the cliff
Far to the south, Ramesses II had two temples cut into the cliffs at Abu Simbel, with four seated colossi of himself at the door; he was not, it must be said, a modest king. And yet the temples are not quite where he left them! In the 1960s they were sawn into great blocks and raised onto higher ground, out of reach of the rising Lake Nasser.
Cleopatra’s city
Our journey ended by the sea, at Alexandria. Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 BCE and it grew famous for its great library and the Pharos lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders; Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, reigned here until her death in 30 BCE. Little of all that still stands, alas, yet we lingered on the shore until the lamps were lit.
Swap two neighbouring amulets to line up three or more of a kind.
Every match gilds the stone beneath it. The bar by the board shows how far you are.
Stars: finish with moves to spare. Three stars need about a third of your moves left.
It starts with just matching and specials; new parts arrive one at a time, each with a short note. A red dot marks anything new.
Three small challenges at every stop.
after your first win
Amulets that fall wearing a power.
from stop 3
A priest’s task, won for a boon to keep.
from stop 4
One-time help for gold and lapis.
from stop 5
Puzzles and choices on the water.
from stop 6
Red-ringed badges that do harm.
from stop 8
Places beside the stops, with amulets under sand or water.
from stop 9
Hardships you choose, for a richer reward.
once the journey is gilded
Beside some of the stops the river showed us more: a doorway in the rock that led down into the dark, a temple lit only by torches, an oasis far out in the desert. Each one opened once we had gilded the stop beside it.
Dim and lit by torches, with amulets of their own: mummies, canopic jars, broad collars, cracked jars and torches. Some amulets lie buried in sand.
Buried in sand. This amulet can’t be moved and it is in no match. Make a match right beside it or blast it with a special to brush the sand off. From then on it is an ordinary amulet and the stone under it is gilded when you match it.
In daylight among date palms, with the amulets of the oases: date palms, pomegranates, grapes and the sacred ibis. Some amulets lie under water.
Under water. The same in an oasis: the amulet can’t be moved until a match beside it lifts it out of the water.
Dress the game to your taste. These change nothing but the look. Most are earned by playing and some are for sale.
10 frames for the board and 10 colours for the sparkle of a match.
46 to find by deeds along the river, never bought, and kept on every journey.
Lasting help, bought with gold and lapis.
Every relic you have found, each with its story.
The whole game is one file, so a copy keeps working without an internet connection. The apps are that same file in a window of its own; progress moves between them with Menu, then Save and restore.
The desktop apps are not signed, so Windows and macOS warn the first time you open them. On macOS, if it says the app is damaged, run xattr -cr "Amulets of Anubis.app" in Terminal.
Amulets of Anubis is built to be taken apart, and the whole game is free software.
Every stop, amulet, note, price, word and picture is a plain file. Edit one, run the build, and the game follows.
New stops, tombs and oases, river events, relics, trials, boons and looks, from a ready, working file.
A new kind of boon, badge or hardship is a few lines, and the manual walks through one.
The build checks every file first and says in plain words what is wrong and where.
The code is GPL, the pictures are public domain (CC0). Your version is one file you can send to anyone.
