Put on some finger cots and get those tappers ready, because today we’re taking a look at a rather click-intensive game: Tap Tap Dig — Idle Clicker Game. This is developed by Bacon Bandit Games and published by Iron Horse Games, LLC. This game is relatively new, having entered open beta on Google Play around January of 2018 and the full release can now be found on either Android or iOS.

In Tap Tap Dig, you are a miner and you seem to have undertaken the rather inadvisable aspiration of digging to the center of the earth. In order to do so, you’ll dig through layer after layer of the Earth’s unsuspecting crust. In classic clicker style, you can either hire helpers which provide a static damage per second, or click madly with as many fingers as you can fit on the screen.

Here, we can see a miner and his entourage in their natural environment…

Although at first blush, the ad system felt very typical (watch ad to speed up cooldown, double idle gold, reroll prestige bonus options, or to get some IAP currency), there is another layer to the ad system that, despite myself, I found to be a successful gamification of ad watching: as you watch ads, they count towards a tally that allows permanent bonuses; once you’ve watched a total of three ads, you get 50% more idle damage. Five more ads gives you a permanent 50% boost to click damage, and so forth. Although I usually steer clear of ads and just pay for an IAP or two if I like a game, this system does make it feel more worth your time to watch the ads.

As an aside, you can also short cut the ad watching for the permanent boosts by paying 10 gems (the IAP currency) instead of watching an ad. By way of the IAP store’s conversion rate, this means that you are getting the equivalent of about $0.66 worth of IAP currency per ad watched (if you watch an ad rather than purchase the global buffs, you’d save yourself 10 gems per ad watched). I suspect the developer sees much less than that $0.66 per ad watched, so the developer seems to be putting a higher value on users watching the ads than typical.

Back to the game! The prestige cycle will earn you fossils that provide a global damage buff per fossil (this starts at a +5%, or a multiplier of +0.05x, per active fossil). Passive players might find they can prestige a few times a day (depending on how often the user checks back in). When I spent a couple prestiges clicking furiously with all 10 fingers, I was prestiging every 15 minutes or so (though the pace is not really sustainable. Get those ice packs ready!). Fossils are earned from obsidian layers, which take more damage to dig through, and seem to show up about every 50–100 layers.

Obsidian layers take quite a bit longer to dig through, but yield fossils, the prestige currency.

Fossils can be spent on “Benefactors,” who provide some global boosts like increased critical taps, increased gold, decreased upgrade prices, increased fossils per obsidian layer, etc. While a couple of these will assist in prestige clear speed (for example, increased fossils per obsidian layer, decreased HP per obsidian layer, and increased global buff per active fossil), most of these benefactors do not seem to be worth the cost of active fossils you must expend to get them.

For example, your sixth benefactor will cost you 55 fossils. But those same fossils by themselves and unspent will give at least a 275% (or 2.75x) increase in damage. So for the most part, it seems to be rather beneficial to pick up the above mentioned cycle-speeding benefactors, and leave the others unpurchased in favor of the raw damage boost from the unspent fossils.

Benefactors are good, but don’t just buy them willy-nilly; sometimes the fossils are better!

A player certainly could play Tap Tap Dig as an idle game, but the benefit from tapping, even somewhat slowly, seems to far outweigh the damage potential from idling: total idle damage per second and damage per click are usually about the same value if you upgrade them equally in costs. The difference comes in as a result of being able to click a LOT more than one time per second, because….

Although there is more clicking involved than I typically enjoy, Tap Tap Dig does something I really rather like to see in clicker games, and that I wish more developers would do: you are able to click simultaneously with seemingly as many fingers as you can fit on the screen. Many clicker games will allow you to click only once at a time, but in Tap Tap Dig, it seems to work fine using all 10 fingers to tap in unison, or staggered — as you prefer. I can’t help but wonder if there is a programmed limit to this, or if it really is “as many fingers as you can fit on the screen.” If it’s the latter, I can imagine some experiments that want doing where one plays on a larger tablet and rigs up a bundle of a few dozen capacitive stylus. But I digress…

Anyone have some tape…?

Suffice to say that clicking seems to be something like 25–50 times more potent than idling (depending on how speedy of a multi-finger-clicker you are). If you’re a more passive-type player, I’d recommend starting the first handful of runs manually tapping. This will allow you to build up some global damage buffs from your fossils, at which point it’s more viable to switch to idling (though clicking always seems to be much more potent; the gap does not appear to close over time).

Achievements will provide another source of multiplicative global damage buffs. As you complete things like total damage dealt, number of clicks, layers destroyed, etc, you will get a buff to damage for each milestone. These buffs start at 1% (for clicking using 10 active skills, for example), and I have seen them go up to 10% per milestone, and maybe more (I’ve only gotten about halfway up the milestones thus far).

The target audience for this game are players who don’t mind, or enjoy tapping their phone a bunch. Although I prefer games more heavily weighted towards idling, I will grant that there’s a certain dynamic peacefulness in turning your brain off for a few minutes and just mashing your phone.

On average, I’d suspect a typical idle/clicker/incremental player to spend perhaps a 3–10 hours on this game, though it will heavily depend on whether you’re a fan of prodigious amounts of tapping. If you’re a Tap Fan™ with calloused and hardened fingertips, the multi-finger tap capability sets Tap Tap Dig apart from and above many other clickers that only allow one click at a time. That and the fact that your ad views count towards both an immediate reward but also larger, longer-term rewards seem to be a main hook for the game. You’ll have to decide if those sound satisfying or not to you.

The graphics are neither poor, nor impressive — they serve the purpose. The setting itself is somewhat prosaic to me, but gives a framework to why you’re doing all this tapping. The music is on a bit of a short loop, but it’s not particularly intrusive or grating. I will say that the sound effect from clicking does provide a satisfying little TWACK.

All told, I’d probably put Tap Tap Dig above most other click-centric games, though my personal preference would steer me towards a more idle-focused game generally speaking. I’d probably place it in the upper quartile of clicker games, but closer to the 50% mark for the overall genre of clicker, idle, and incremental games.