Clever Foursquare Hack Turns New York City Into a Giant Game of Risk | Hacker News Reader

Clever Foursquare Hack Turns New York City Into a Giant Game of Risk

mashable.com

78 pointssiculars28 comments

There's no real mention of how the game mechanics are integrated. It's not really risk if it's simply "the most checkins wins." No element of chance. Could still be early in the game however.

We're still tweaking game mechanics, but the general way it works right now is like this:

- If you checkin and your borough already owns that neighborhood your checkin adds a defender to the neighborhood.

- If you checkin and your borough doesn't own that neighborhood, your checkin counts as an attack.

-For an attack we do a dice roll, and based on that dice roll you take out X number of defenders. If your checkin takes out all the defense then your borough now owns that neighborhood and you become a defender.

As the user base increases we'll definitely be tweaking things, but the element of chance is huge to us. It's what keeps things interesting.

That sounds great. Thank you for explaining what was missing in the article.

The game hit 600 players this afternoon and the dev teams says they are planning to build new feature so users can see the real time soldier count as the check ins fly and the battles go down!

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/fourcraft-turns-your-chec...

I'd be interested to know how you are using the Foursquare API to get check-ins. Are you just requesting user check-ins at regular intervals or is it cleverer than that?

Anyone looking for a localized version of risk should definitely checkout Own This World: http://ownthisworld.com/

It works around the globe and it's quite fun. It actually changed how I travel about the city... pretty awesome. The devs are very active with it too (Edit: and they just hit 10k users.)

Huh, no Android but Windows Phone and iPhone support. That's the first time I've seen that combo.

IIRC the developers do .NET for their day jobs, and Canada (where they're from) doesn't have the same Android penetration as the USA. But I agree, bizarre choice.

An Android version is being developed. The reason we went with WP7 before Android, was that a .NET developer friend wanted to try building something for the platform when it was announced. Seemed like a good fit to get in at launch.

I'd love to see this done in South Central Los Angeles.

It would be nice if they open-sourced it so people could make their own maps, teams, etc.

I'm one of the developers who worked on the project. We actually have been discussing open sourcing the project for this reason.

The biggest challenge is setting up the neighborhood constraints and getting the checkins to map correctly to those constraints. But it's on our radar, and we're open to any ideas people have.

Honestly, you could probably even keep it closed-source, so long as people could design their own map overlays. I'm not sure how foursquare works for this - I actually tried to work with the API so my computer could send my girlfriend a text whenever she checked into a shoe store - but it seemed impossible.

If you were trying to discourage your girlfriend from purchasing shoes, this method would probably only discourage your girlfriend from checking in to shoe stores.

Granted; it was meant to be more of a humorous surprise for her. It also turned out to be much more of a challenge than I expected - there was no way to get a list of checkins for a friend, so I ended up setting up another account, friending her, and setting it to e-mail me whenever a friend checked in.

The plan was to use Lamson to parse these e-mails, but apparently it depended on a library that - in a minor version upgrade - totally fucked everything that depended on it by arbitrarily renaming several functions. Unless you specifically installed fucktits version 2.2 - not 2.1, and god help you if you installed 2.3 - it wouldn't work.

After three days, and help from a friend, I just tossed it all in the garbage and resigned myself to living under a pile of her shoes.

provisional +1 for when you release the source on gitHub, looks like a brilliant idea though

May I ask where you sourced your neighborhood boundary KML? I could use this.

Don't worry -- remember how craigslist used to only be for SF? You start your project static, then develop towards dynamicism. We'll be playing Fourcraft in Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, and they may even get enough of a playerbase to really take it international (Africa has control of Minnesota!).

Or go global!

Maybe NYC gangs can start using Foursquare instead of guns to settle their turf wars. :)

This is something I've been meaning to mention to the FS developers for like a year now. All you need is to let people be members of teams and track team presence with some basic blob-based map overlays. People will quickly and naturally divide into Red and Blue, Jets and Sharks, North and South. It's possible they don't want to introduce that element, but I know it'd be fun as hell now that it's so popular in many urban locations.

Turf, an antecedent.

http://www.smedresmania.com/turf/

QONQR is doing something similar but with more than just checkins.

As a big risk and Langrab fan, this looks pretty awesome.

All hail the barbarian armies of the Waste Land!... :)

I take it that's Jersey?

Read the description of the "game". So.... neither Risk or Warcraft or WOW. Foursquare is involved though, that's the only honest/accurate part.

Very clever. I'd like to see you re-enact Napoleon of Notting Hill using this system.

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