Outdoor addiction - GPS games is for everyone

GPS games is where you, with the help of your GPS in you phone (probably) move around outdoors to accomplish something, maybe to collect points, complete achievements, discover things, measure time between two spots, ....

As people tend to be more and more sitting indoors, maybe GPS games is something that could get them to go outdoors? GPS games have had such effects, like the success with geocaching or even more Pokémon Go which was a great hit.

Now there are many more GPS games than the ones mentioned, and I believe there is a GPS games for more or less everyone, although there are no GPS game that fit everyone.

I have played quite a few GPS games, with geocaching the one I have played the longest. Have written much about geocaching, so below I write about two other GPS games that do tend to play every day.

Besides geocaching, I mainly do two GPS games that are both created here in Sweden. They are both GPS games that work fine with having routes on your way to work - you can visit the same spot every day if you like. So I do these as a daily routine, while geocaching is more visiting new places, so that is mostly when I am being touristic.

Turf

Turf is an app game (on Android and Iphone) mainly for people who ride bikes. You go visit spots (zones) around the city that you capture to score some points. As long as no one else captures your zone it does also give a small bonus to you.

The game is played in rounds from lunch the 1st Sunday in one month to the 1st Sunday the next month, so 4 or 5 weeks. Each rounds is a world wide competition, where the top gets some kind of prizes. You also gets different kind of (virtual) medals for achievements, like number of all time captures, visiting different number of regions, .... Has been going for 9 years, and some are very dedicated to this game. (I also wrote about turf a long time ago...)

Note! Turf is not available in all countries. In those countries that it has not been released the number of zones is very limited, mainly at world heritages and tourist sites.

Towers

Towers is a game the was officially released this year as an Android app, although I have being doing beta testing for a year.

It does have some similarities to Turf as you do capture things, in this case virtual Towers, but here you do not get any scores for keeping them. Instead you can capture it again later, with lower scores for doing it if you do it later the same day.

Another big difference compared to Turf is that it is the players that place the towers. To do this you do need some resources, and you get some resources by doing captures. You can also upgrade towers to higher levels (like Ingress) but that cost resources. Higher level towers also gives you different kind of resources. As the players do the placement (compared to turf where the game masters place out zones) there is also a restriction so that no tower may be closer than 500 meter to another tower - after all this is to get you outdoors doing some moving around.
As might be gathered the towers do tend to end up close to turf zones, so making it an excellent possibility to combine the two GPS games.


See you around!