OvARlay – Treasure Hunt

Hide targets in the woods, the park or the garden — then send the children out. They watch themselves move across the map and go looking for whatever you put there.

And the map can be anything: a treasure map drawn at the kitchen table, the zoo plan, the board at the trailhead, a city map from 1890. OvARlay puts your real GPS position onto a photo of any map at all. Even one drawn crooked, with no scale, that no mapping service on earth has heard of.

OvARlay is a gift to anyone who likes being outdoors: free, with no ads, no in-app purchases and no account.

THE HUNT

• Targets gated by a quiz question or a QR code on the spot • A surprise on finding: text, a picture, or a voice recording • Targets visible from the start — or hidden until found • A sonar tick that quickens the closer you get • Points, a step count, and a history: when you played, how it ended

THE PURSUER

For anyone who wants it tenser, switch on a pursuer. It walks towards you and blocks collecting while it stands on you — with a heartbeat that quickens as it closes in. If it catches you, it costs a life.

One thing matters here: the defaults are set so that brisk walking is always enough. Nobody should be running while looking at a phone. Speed, distance and lives are yours to set.

IN AR OR ON THE MAP

Hold the camera up and the targets appear in the picture — with direction and distance, arrows for whatever is behind you, and nearer means larger. You can play a whole round through the camera alone.

NO MAP OF YOUR OWN? NO PROBLEM

Frame an area on the world map and OvARlay turns it into a playable map in one step. It can also suggest targets that are already out there: hunting hides, wayside crosses, boundary stones, towers, springs. Deliberately the overlooked things, not the nearest coffee shop.

PASSING HUNTS ON

A finished map becomes a file. Send it to the people who are going to play, with every target and surprise inside it.

FOR SERIOUS USE TOO

The same machinery carries more than a game. A Roman fort, a monastery garden, a historic quarter: anyone holding an old or archaeological plan can let visitors walk across it. An ordinary maps app cannot — it has never seen the plan.

FREE, AD-FREE, SPARING WITH DATA

OvARlay costs nothing: no subscription, no in-app purchases, no pro version holding back the best part. There are no adverts and no trackers — no analytics service inside the app counts who plays when, or for how long.

Your position never leaves the device while you play. No account, no sign-in, no email address, no server that knows where you walked. Hunts and progress live on the phone.

Creating a map does load map data, and sends your position with place searches — while playing, it does not.

Starting a challenge, to play the same hunt against others, puts a nickname and a result on a leaderboard — never a position. It is deleted after 30 days at the latest.

And one note we think matters: a treasure map you drew yourself holds the real coordinates of your garden. Think about who you send it to.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, © Mapbox.