Auntie's Baskets

Auntie's Baskets is a quiet puzzle game built around documented basket designs from Northern California — Maidu, Yana, Atsugewi, Achomawi, Mountain Maidu, Pit River, and (in the Northwestern catalog) Yurok, Karok, and Hupa basketry traditions. Each of the three modes — Match-3, Jigsaw, and Slide — ends with a basket design revealed, named, and credited to the people who wove it. Forty-two documented designs. Three modes. No timers. No lives. No leaderboards. Done when you're done. **The modes** **Match-3** — Tiles you match brighten the basket above the board, shape by shape, until the whole design is woven. Forty-two levels cover the full documented catalog, with covered tiles, locked tiles, and woven blockers appearing as the curve deepens. **Jigsaw** — Forty-two documented designs as puzzle images on woven tan. Pieces snap when they're right. **Slide** — A sliding puzzle with a twist: one tile is held off the grid. Solve the grid, then set the held weft to finish — the way a real basket is completed by working in the last strand by hand. Forty-two slide puzzles give every design the held-weft treatment. **The designs** The first twelve baskets are traced from Paul E. Schulz's *Indians of Lassen* (Loomis Museum Association, 1954). The Northwestern catalog of thirty designs — Yurok, Karok, and Hupa — comes from A. L. Kroeber's *Basket Designs of the Indians of Northwestern California* (UC Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1905, public domain). The names, the peoples, and the verbatim captions in the reveal screens come from the books. The designs are not decoration; they are the content. Wolf's eye. Earthworm. Arrow-point. Mountain and cloud. Sturgeon- back. Spread-hand. Forty-two designs your grandmother might have known. **Your basket** Every completed level adds its design to a cumulative basket surface organized by people — a quiet record of what you've woven across your full playthrough. **Made by** Auntie's Baskets is built by H. L. Delaney, a member of the Klamath Confederated Tribes. The background music is composed and mastered by the developer. The cultural framing of the app — what the designs are credited to, what the captions preserve, what is and isn't documented — is the spine. Geometric shapes get matched and assembled; the cultural ground is held. **What this game is not** Not free-to-play. Not ad-supported. Not session-based. There is no daily login bonus, no energy meter, no premium currency, no leaderboard. One purchase, one app, finite levels. Plays on iPhone and iPad. Designed for people who like puzzles, who like learning quietly, and who would rather play carefully than rush.