Sandkeeper

Pour colored sand into a glass bottle, a grain at a time. Lean the bottle and the layers slope. Tap the glass and the sand settles. Drop in a shell. Cork it, name it, and set it on the window sill.

• Sand that falls grain by grain: pour, lean, tap, poke, and watch it settle

• 64 bottle shapes and 30 sand colors, and once the book is done, mix your own

• 48 places from your grandfather's book, each in its own light

• 52 keepsakes that come home to a seaside cottage you decorate

• Send a bottle to a friend as a code, and save a photo of any bottle

• No score, no timer, nothing to buy, nothing can fail

Your grandfather left you his seaside cottage and his book of 48 places, with the bottle he poured for each one. Follow him page by page and pour your own: a quay at low tide, the hills over Kyoto on the last night of the year, a shore on Sanibel at dawn.

Finish a page and something comes home from it: an oar, a paper lantern, a jar of wild flowers, a carved loon.

The room is yours to arrange: wallpaper, paint, curtains, a rug, keepsakes on their hooks. A porch where the mail comes, a stove, a plant to water, and five classic books on the shelf.

The light through the window follows the clock on the wall.

Photograph any bottle, or send one you poured to a friend as a code. No account, nothing to sign up for.

Two more crafts wait in the house: sand boards to peel and pour, and a round tray of sand to draw on with a pen, where a wheel turns any scribble into a twelve fold flower.

The cottage has one more room to show you.

Sit down for ten minutes or an afternoon. Every picture is drawn by the game's own code, and the music box plays its tune live. The tide never comes in the same way twice.

More to find

• Replay any bottle you've poured and watch it fill again

• A gull that takes to your window and a mouse under the desk

• 30 quiet achievements