Scavenger hunts, borough by borough and town by town

What it is

A free scavenger hunt game played on foot, by subway or by car. Each hunt is a themed route with real stops, real addresses and a task at every one. Teams go out, complete the tasks, and send back a photo from each stop. The judges review every photo, points land when they approve it, and the leaderboard settles the rest.

The New York hunts include the Icons of Midtown, Old New York from Wall Street to the Seaport, the Central Park Ramble, the 7 train through Queens. There are 31 hunts in all, from the five boroughs and Long Island out to Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and a couple in Europe.

Who it is for

Friends, families and teams who want a reason to go out and look properly at a place. There are hunts built for kids, where grown-ups drive and kids do the finding. There are hunts for adults only, clearly marked. Each one says how long it takes, how many stops it has and how you get around.

There is no entry fee. The site never touches money. Winners get bragging rights.

How it works

1. Register once. One form, one time. You get a hunter number and a call sign. That pair is your key to every hunt.
2. Pick a hunt. Each is a route of stops, with a task at every stop worth between 5 and 25 points.
3. Bring back proof. Photo check-ins from your phone at each stop.
4. Judged by people. Every photo is reviewed before the points count. No automatic scoring to game.
5. Claim the glory. A leaderboard for standings, a gallery of shots from the field, and a hunter portal.

What I built

A small web application with real moving parts: registration, a library of hunts with their stops and tasks, photo uploads from phones out in the street, a review queue for the judges, scoring, a leaderboard and a public gallery. Maps come from OpenStreetMap.

It runs on the same estate as everything else here, behind the same edge, with the same monitoring and nightly backups. A game people play outdoors on their phones has to work on a weak signal, so the pages are plain and light.

The deliberate decisions matter as much as the code. No money changes hands, so there is no payment system to secure. Age limits and safety notes are written on the hunts that need them.

What it shows I can do

• Build a complete application with user registration, file uploads, a human review step and public results.
• Design a process with people in the loop where judgement matters, rather than automating everything.
• Keep the scope honest: leaving out what is not needed, such as payments, removes a whole category of risk.
• Write content people enjoy, at scale, across dozens of routes in different places.

For a client, the same shape fits any workflow where people submit something, someone reviews it, and the result is published: requests, approvals, inspections, field reports.

Questions people ask