

Clever Foursquare Hack Turns New York City Into a Giant Game of Risk - siculars
http://mashable.com/2011/06/29/world-of-fourcraft/

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edkennedy
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.

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shakes
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.

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

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bproper
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...](http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/29/fourcraft-turns-your-check-in-
action-into-global-domination/)

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gavingmiller
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.)

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

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gavingmiller
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.

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brennancreative
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.

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hugh3
I'd love to see this done in South Central Los Angeles.

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

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shakes
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

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cbailey
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.

~~~
pavel_lishin
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.

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

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devindotcom
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.

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scelerat
Turf, an antecedent.

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

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

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

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Jeema3000
All hail the barbarian armies of the Waste Land!... :)

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pavel_lishin
I take it that's Jersey?

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

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

