Troubador Tour Board

Troubador Tour Board (now defunct) was a leisurely stroll game you played on your phone. You played a theatrical agent who goes from place to place, setting up routes between those places. Musicians take you on as their agent. You got more bonuses based on how many musicians are in places "connected" to you by the routes you set up. Why was it a "stroll game"? Because you moved around the game map by walking around in real life. The "places" you visited were actual places in your neighborhood.

I'd played a few location-based games, games in which you move around in real life to play the game. I liked walking, so these games appealed. But I liked walking, so these games didn't appeal that much because there tended to be short stints of walking amidst long stretches of standing around phone-fiddling. With this game, you hauled your phone out of your pocket, fiddled with your phone for a few seconds, put your phone back into your pocket, walked a couple of minutes. Much higher walking:phone-ing ratio.

(Earlier versions of this game were more complex: there were different "types" of places to visit (restaurant, shop, water-y, …); in addition to musicians, there were other "NPCs" in the game (PR flacks, road-builders, goons, …). But these complexities didn't make the game more fun. At least not when I, a walker, thought Hey I could be walking instead of fiddling with this game mechanic.)

The game learned about local places from Wikipedia by way of GeoNames. If you were the first person in some area to try the game, it didn't "know" about local places yet. I guess that means that most new players picked up the game, see nothing to do, and gave up on it forever. No doubt if I took this game more seriously, I'd be sure to "prime the pump" by making it learn about places in a bunch of places, but as it turns out, I'm pretty and never did that.

I put the Troubador Tour Board source code up on github. I learned things from making this game. I'd heard that newfangled web pages had abilities heretofore only for native apps: geolocation and fancy graphics. The rumors were true! This game's graphics were pretty cheesy-looking, but it wasn't a phone's fault. Too bad my drawing skills weren't so great.

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