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Five GPS games to play with your smartphone

Posted on 26 Feb 2010 at 13:29

4. Travel bugs

Geocaching, Geodashing and Waymarking are quick-hit smartphone games, but Travel Bugs are an ongoing project. Each is a dog tag to which you assign a mission before dropping it into a Geocache stash. The next Geocacher to find your bug in a cache takes it out, logs their find at geocaching.com and reads the bug’s mission, which could be anything from travelling around the world heading east or west to visiting capital cities or staying near water.

Their finder’s job is to help your bug on its way by moving it to the next logical cache on its route. When they do, you’re sent an email, and you can plot its journey on Google Maps.

Travel Bugs are bought in pairs, of which one half goes into the cache while you hold onto its twin. A single pair costs £4.59 from Aboveandbeyond, and you can buy five pairs at a time for £19.75 from Geotastic.com.

Sign up for a free account at geocaching.com and click click here to track the progress of a travel bug that to date has travelled more than 1600 miles from Lizard Point, Cornwall, to the Netherlands, by way of Germany and Scotland.

5. Degree Confluence Project

What is a confluence? It’s the point where a line of latitude meets a line of longitude. Think back to your school room globe and it’s the spots where the horizontal and vertical lines cross. Each of these is a zero point without minutes or fractions of a degree. A perfect coordinate.

The Confluence Project sets players the task of visiting every single confluence, from which they post a photo at confluence.org. Often the result is a stretch of water or an empty field, but plenty fall amid cityscapes, and with 10,510 still to be found around the world there’s plenty of gameplay left to be had.

Even if you don’t want to take part, check out the massive (and growing) online gallery posted by other players for some unexpected finds. Brunei’s one and only confluence, for example, isn’t sandy at all, but lush green jungle.

Author: Nik Rawlinson