Move through a street and it is yours until somebody else does.
That is the whole game. Everything below is the detail of how a claim is decided, and what stops it being gamed.
Pick the sport, then move
Walk, run or cycle — you choose before you start, and the choice decides which of the three games this counts in. The phone records the route in the background, with the screen locked, and keeps it if the app is killed mid-way.
We check it before anything changes hands
On finish, the activity is verified on our side: speed against the sport you picked, the physics of the track, the signals a faked location leaves behind. Nothing is claimed by the device that would benefit from the claim.
Every hexagon you crossed becomes yours
The route is turned into the set of H3 hexagons it passed through — about sixty-six metres across, so a claim is a street. If your route closed a loop, everything inside it is claimed too, up to a cap that stops one long ride swallowing a city.
Then you defend it
Cover your own ground again and it holds. Leave it a month and it fades to neutral. Somebody who covers it in the same sport takes it, and you are told who.
Three layers over one map, and they never touch.
The same street can have a walk owner, a run owner and a cycle owner at the same time. It is the rule that makes the game fair to someone who walks: the person who takes your ground had to do exactly what you did.
- Walk
- The slowest way to take ground, and the one anybody can start today.
- Run
- Cover more streets in less time, and hold them against people doing the same.
- Cycle
- Whole neighbourhoods in one ride — and the longest perimeters to defend.
Questions people ask
- Does it track me when I am not recording?
- No. Location is read while an activity you started is running, and not between activities. You can also set a privacy zone around home so the start and end of a route are never shown to anybody else.
- What happens if I lose signal?
- The recording is written to the phone as it goes, so it survives a crash, a dead battery screen or a tunnel, and it uploads when you are back on a network.
- Can I buy territory?
- No, and there is no plan to allow it. Paying for XFitnest gets you more to look at — it has never bought a metre of ground.
- What if someone fakes a run?
- Their activity keeps its place in their own history with the reason it failed on it, and claims nothing. Nine checks run on every upload before territory moves.