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!

It was a long time since I last wrote anything here... Oh, I do still do geocaching, but not that much. 

So what to do with this blogg? Well I think I might still use it, but I probably will broaden it a bit, to maybe cover things that I find interesting. Although I might restrict that to hobbies of mine. Below I list a couple of subjects that might show up. Hm, maybe I need to rename this blogg - is that possible?

Science Fiction

Science Fiction (or SF for short) is something I have been interested in for a very long time. Earlier this year my local SF club (Linköpings Science Fiction-förening) celebrated its 30th birthday with a party at the Redin Mansion. Still going strong with club meetings several times each month. The club has always been into the SF litterature, kind of high brow, but in recent years TV series have been a big part of the monthly club meetings.

For my own part I can see my SF interest show up in some of my other hobbies.

This year I will also try visiting the SF World Con in Dublin mid August. My first ever visit to Ireland.

GPS games

GPS games is when you use the GPS in a gamified way. The most well known examples of this are geocaching and Pokémon Go. I do this as it does give me a good reason to get outdoors and maybe even get some exercise.

There are a lot of different GPS games, and they have a bit different setup and play. Some are completely augmented reality where the things exists only in the virtual world (like Pokémon Go where the "monsters" appear in your app) while some do use physical things that you use an app or a handheld GPS to locate (for example geocaching or Munzee). It should not be confused with virtual reality games, where you don't go outside...

I do believe that there are GPS games for most people - you just have to find one that fits you.

TV series

I do follow a couple of TV series. As mentioned above, SF do play a part, so I tend to be interested in TV series with SF content, but I watch other things as well. As time is limited I try to restrict it to TV series that have good recommendation, mostly from people with compatible taste.

Board games

boardgamegeek.com

Now games has always been a big interest for me. Have been interested in all kinds of games, although interest vary over time. It seems I is much less interested in video games, but tend to focus more on physical games, like card, board and table top games.

Board games I have been into since the 70s. Although I played mainly mainstream games (like Alga) when I was young, in the 80s I started with role playing and also more hobby board games. The role playing ones did pass over after about 10 years, but board games are still around. And in recent years I have really expanded on my collection.

Summarize

I think this can be enough for now. More things might be added if I feel for it... but I will try to avoid more controversial subjects as you can get enough of that on the social media.

So expect to get more content here in the future, and not just about geocaching...

Oh yes, do the description needs update?

King, somewhat cut down

Probably. My chihuahua is since many years named Daisy, not King. Poor King... He was long coated and had problems with big problems with sickness so we had to put him down when he was just 4 years. Although I had removed my first Chihuahua Poppe when he was 10 years old, that last visit with King to the veterinary was one of my worst experiences. Otherwise the description seems to be quite accurate.

Daisy on the balcony

Daisy is a short coated Chihuahua. White, with one ear fully brown, and the other one partially brown. Also have some brown around the tail root.

She is very healthy, and had had little problems. She is also the most lap-dogish of all 4 dogs I have had.








See you around!

Oh... it was a long time since I wrote anything here. Not that I haven't had anything to write about, quite the contrary, but I have not feel motivated enough to do it.

So, I will return to the subject of the latest entry, namely geocaching statics in Östergötland. This time I have based the number solely on the http://project-gc.com which is a very useful site if you're interested in statistics. But do not take the number to be set in stone (I will get back to it).

What I did was to make querries with caches placed at 2012-12-31 and compared to 2013-12-31. This means that placed caches not yet published haven't made it. And any cache placed before 2012-12-31 that has been archived during 2013 is not part of the 2012-12-31 statistics. So the numbers are just a good guess.

According to project-gc there is 4146 caches in Östergötland at the moment, which puts Östergötland at place #5. In 2012-12-31 the place was the same but the number just 2820, so we had left Jönköping behind and is closing in on Dalarna. If the V Ö P T continues to grow maybe we will pass Dalarna in 2014?

Numbers per county

Big increase in Motala and Kinda this year. Ydre also managed to increase with more than 50%. The # column below is the number of cache types.

County	Total				Trad			Multi			Myst
	2013	2012	Diff	#	'13	'12	Diff	'13	'12	Diff	'13	'12	Diff
Norrköping	1058	776	+228	6	827	623	+196	35	22	+13	179	120	+59
Linköping	982	757	+225	7	633	473	+160	81	62	+19	252	213	+39
Motala	856	416	+440	6	682	288	+394	41	33	+8	123	88	+35
Ödeshög	300	241	+59	4	277	222	+55	4	4	0	18	14	+4
Finspång	262	198	+64	6	229	172	+57	4	3	+1	26	21	+5
Mjölby	183	121	+62	6	141	88	+53	20	17	+3	21	16	+5
Kinda	136	70	+66	4	120	61	+59	4	4	0	11	4	+7
Boxholm	93	76	+17	3	86	69	+17	3	3	0	4	4	0
Vadstena	69	49	+20	3	61	44	+17	3	2	+1	5	3	+2
Åtvidaberg	69	55	+14	3	60	47	+13	2	2	0	7	6	+1
Söderköping	49	45	+4	4	33	32	+1	5	5	0	10	8	+2
Ydre	45	29	+16	2	44	28	+16	1	1	0	0	0	0
Valdemarsvik	44	37	+7	3	39	33	+6	2	2	0	1	1	0

Favorit points

FP is something that might give an indication. A cache with high number of FP might be a great one, or it might be a very well-logged cache that just a few have set an FP. So it just gives an indication. Of course, the larger the number of caches the larger the FP count is but below I present the counties in order of FP per cache.

County	Total	Total FP	Total FP	Ratio FP
	Caches	2013	2012	per cache
Linköping	982	5489	4793	5.59
Finspång	262	1388	1260	5.30
Vadstena	69	237	212	3.43
Motala	856	2398	1682	2.80
Norrköping	1058	2874	2529	2.72
Söderköping	49	133	130	2.71
Ödeshög	300	712	647	2.37
Mjölby	183	377	297	2.06
Kinda	136	243	210	1.79
Ydre	45	73	63	1.62
Boxholm	93	129	124	1.39
Åtvidaberg	69	81	66	1.17
Valdemarsvik	44	28	25	0.64

Summary

This gives some number for each county. I will get back another time with a look at the top list when it comes to COs.

Statistics for Östergötland, August 2012

I have been late in giving you the latest statistics but now it is time to do so. Expect to get the next installment around New Years Eve or so.

As before the statistics is for any non-archived, non-event cache that is placed within the borders of Östergötland (according to geocaching.com). I have corrected the selection so "temporarily disabled" caches are included as well.

This time there has been some minor explosions of cache clusters, e.g. Silverskogen in Norrköping. And the struggle between Linköping and Norrköping continues... The biggest climbes this time is Åtvidaberg and Boxholm that have more than doubled its number.

Today there are 2859 (+762) active caches in Östergötland. Of these one (http://coord.info/GC1TG25) is located in Hallsberg, and two others is located in Askersund. Some border line cases in the other direction also exists, but the State field is the one that I use.

The top list, caches per county, are:

Place	County	GeoCaches	Count diff
1	Norrköping	785	255
2	Linköping	764	187
3	Motala	373	76
4	Ödeshög	232	64
5	Finspång	206	16
6	Mjölby	141	36
7	Boxholm	73	43
	Kinda		19
9	Åtvidaberg	56	30
10	Söderköping	48	12
11	Vadstena	40	11
12	Valdemarsvik	36	4
13	Ydre	29	7

Number of cache types per county:

Place	County	Types
1	Linköping	7
2	Finspång	5
	Motala
	Norrköping
5	Kinda	4
	Ödeshög
7	Boxholm	3
	Mjölby
	Söderköping
	Vadstena
	Åtvidaberg
12	Valdemarsvik	2
	Ydre

Count per cache type (with ratios based on 2859 caches) in the state:

Place	Type	Count	Ratio
1	Traditional	2156	75.4% (+1.0%)
2	Unknown	508	17.8% (-0.2%)
3	Multi	171	6.0% (-0.1%)
4	Whereigo	11	0.4%
5	Earthcache	10	0.4%
6	Letterbox	2	<0.1%
7	Virtual	1	<0.1%

Traditionals per county:

Place	County	Trads	Count diff
1	Norrköping	631	191
2	Linköping	472	129
3	Motala	245	61
4	Ödeshög	211	57
5	Finspång	182	12
6	Mjölby	104	28
7	Boxholm	65	43
8	Kinda	63	16
9	Åtvidaberg	48	28
10	Söderköping	35	6
11	Vadstena	34	10
	Valdemarsvik		2
13	Ydre	28	7

Multis per county:

Place	County	Multis	Count diff
1	Linköping	68	16
2	Motala	37	5
3	Norrköping	21	2
4	Mjölby	19	3
5	Söderköping	5	2
6	Kinda	4	2
	Ödeshög		1
8	Boxholm	3	0
	Finspång		0
10	Vadstena	2	0
	Valdemarsvik		1
	Åtvidanberg		0
13	Ydre	1	0

Unknown per county:

Place	County	Unknowns	Count diff
1	Linköping	216	41
2	Norrköping	127	60
3	Motala	85	9
4	Finspång	19	3
5	Mjölby	18	5
6	Ödeshög	16	6
7	Söderköping	8	4
8	Åtvidaberg	6	2
9	Boxholm	5	0
10	Kinda	4	0
	Vadstena	4	1
12	Valdemarsvik	0	-1
	Ydre	0	0

Top list, cache placement, are:

Place	Owner	Placed	Place diff
1	The Smokestoners	188	-1
2	Bo & Elisabeth	157	+1
3	Fjärderlös Tvåfoting	129	+2
4	LHCper	109	=
5	Patojen	91	-2
6	Target.	62	+2
7	Silversnake	58	new
8	androsen	54	-1
9	RDun_Swe	53	-3
10	LelleRos	49	=
	m1m3r		new

Placement of traditionals:

Place	Owner	Trads	Place diff
1	The Smokestoners	177	=
2	Fjärderlös Tvåfoting	124	+2
3	Bo & Elisabeth	102	-1
4	Patojen	82	-1
5	Target.	55	+1
6	LHCper	51	new
7	androsen	48	-2
8	LelleRos	41	=
	Muslie		new
10	Christer & Christina	36	new
	torado		new

Placement of multis:
new

Place	Owner	Multis	Place diff
1	LHCper	24	+1
2	Bo & Elisabeth	23	-1
3	BHJ	8	=
4	m1m3r	6	=
	RDun_Swe	6	=
	pinkunicorn		new
7	Aggbjörn	4	-1
	Eisander		+1
	esso		-2
	Venedig		+1

Placement of unknowns:

Place	Owner	Unknowns	Place diff
1	SilverSnake	56	new
2	RDun_Swe	41	-1
3	LHCper	33	-1
4	kejomot	29	-1
5	Bo & Elisabeth	28	-1
6	Team Fetchez La Cache	22	-1
7	m1m3r	16	=
8	pinkunicorn	13	new
9	Tech of Sweden	11	new
10	The Smokestoners	10	new

So, that's all for today. If you want to have more statistics like that, please comment. Or if you want less...  Or if you want some other statistics...  But please comment.