I am happy to announce that PuzzleHike.app has reached its first stable release. PuzzleHike is a web application for organizing and walking puzzle hikes, where each waypoint on the route asks you a question and the answer unlocks the next leg of the walk. Think of it as GeoCaching, but everything is virtual. There is no plastic box hidden under a rock, no logbook, and no muggles to worry about. The puzzles live on your phone and the location checks happen against the GPS coordinates of the waypoints.
See: www.puzzlehike.app
How it compares to GeoCaching
Traditional GeoCaching depends on a physical cache. Someone has to place it, maintain it, replace the logbook when it gets wet, and hope that nobody walks off with it. That works, but it limits where you can set up a route, and it ties the experience to the condition of the container. PuzzleHike.app removes the physical layer entirely. A waypoint is a coordinate, a puzzle, and an answer. The participant walks to the spot, sees the question appear on their phone, and types the answer to continue. The route owner never has to leave the house to refill a stamp pad.
This makes PuzzleHike.app well suited for one-off events like a birthday party, a team outing, or a school excursion. You can design a hike the night before, share the URL of the app, and have everyone walking the route the next morning. It is also a good fit for permanent walks along a town’s history, where a physical cache would be impractical to maintain over the years.
Anyone can register and start a hike
The headline feature of v1 is that the app is now fully self-service. You no longer need an invite or a manual account setup from me. Just go to the site, register with an email address, and you can immediately start creating your own hikes. Each hike has a name, a starting point and a series of waypoints with optional puzzles.
There is no app to install. PuzzleHike runs as a progressive web app in the browser, so it works on Android, iOS, and any modern desktop. The participant side is intentionally minimalistic. The author side allows for waypoints to be added and for one or more activities to be attached to each of them.
GPX import and export
PuzzleHike supports importing and exporting routes as GPX files, which makes it very easy to design a new hike with the help of GPX Studio. You create the waypoints in GPX Studio, export the result, and upload it into PuzzleHike to seed your waypoints. The other way around works too, so you can export an existing PuzzleHike route, tweak the path in GPX Studio, and import it back. A few minutes of clicking replaces what used to be an afternoon of manual map work.
Directions and activities
The way participants navigate between waypoints is, for now, deliberately simple: the app shows the distance to the next waypoint, and that is the only directional instruction available. No bearing, no arrow, no turn-by-turn, just a number that gets smaller as you walk in the right direction. It is enough to make the hike feel like a search rather than a guided tour, and it keeps the participant looking around at their surroundings instead of staring at a map.
At each waypoint you can attach one or more activities. The current set covers the most common cases: one or more questions with an expected answer, a request to log a free-form text, and a request to upload a picture. You can combine these in any order on a single waypoint, for example a question followed by a photo proof. Both the directional instructions and the activities are areas I plan to expand in future versions, but the v1 set is already enough to build varied and entertaining hikes.
What is next
For v1 I focused on the basics: account management, route waypoints, and the participant flow. On the roadmap for the next versions are more types of directional instructions beyond plain distance, and additional activity types at waypoints.
Go register, plan a walk, and let your friends sweat over a riddle in the woods. Enjoy!