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.

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.

YOUR DATA

Nothing leaves the device while you play. No account, no sign-in, no server that knows where you walked. Maps 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.

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.