We’ve seen a lot of clever hacks on the Foursquare system, however none of them have come even close to a new game called World Of Fourcraft. The game uses the company’s check-in capabilities and Google map APIs to transform New York City into one big game of Risk the popular battle board game that pits users against one another for world domination or in this case city domination.
When a user checks in at different areas around the city they are basically placing their plastic men in that areas board game. The system then figures out which “teams” players have checked into that area the most in order to determine who owns the area.
By placing players on teams (there are currently approximately 100 players) the game essentially allows for multiple “plastic pieces” to be placed in each area based upon check-in.
The game was created by a team of seven programmers during a recent New York General Assembly hackathon and team member Ricky Robinett told Mashable of their creation:
“We wanted to make foursquare more compelling for long-term use,” while going on to add, “[On Foursquare] you have a weekly total that gets swiped at the end of the week. This keeps adding up.”
The hackathon doesn’t offer any type of prizes to it’s winners, it’s done for fun and the pride of having your invention shared the most and tweeted about by your peers and people who adapt to your program.
Since the game was created in a very short period of time it’s still only a “basic” concept, however Robinett says it will continue to develop and a “level up” feature much like those found in World of Warcraft will be added to make more-freuqent users’ checkins more exciting in the game while claiming neighborhoods with your team of players.
Here’s a quick look at the full map of the cities neighborhoods available via the game. With all of the different areas in New York the game has plenty of checkin options for users.
Are you willing to give World of Fourcraft a try? It will be interesting to see if the concept scales to other large cities in the future and how gameplay will develop as the Foursquare hack continues to mature.
