Last weekend Ollia and Tuomas went to a 24h skiing adventure to find new tiles.
Plan tile hunting trips with friends easier with our Friends feature – compare and see your friends tiles
One of the most persistent frustrations in collaborative tile hunting has been route planning. How do you design a route so that everyone in the group gets the new tiles they want?
In the past this had been done by sending screenshots and trying to decipher where the missing tiles are.
Wandrio-app already allows you to see your real-time location and nearby tiles, so you can change plans in the middle of the adventure. But in practice, things get complicated. After a 100km+ adventure, it can be surprisingly hard to convince your friends to add an extra 10-20 kilometers, just because you want to collect a tile they already have.
We’ve faced these “micro-crises” ourselves in our team during Wandrio adventures. The attraction of sauna and beer might win over my precious tiles. (Not pointing any fingers…) So we had a strong incentive to fix the problem.
Introducing the Friends Feature
We’ve launched the first version of Wandrio’s Friends feature.
With it, you can:
- Follow your friends (with mutual approval)
- Compare collected tiles
- See differences in your tile maps
- Compare statuses such as Legend, Finder, and Mayor, points and levels.
Privacy is essential to us. Wandrio does not allow tracking strangers without consent. All follow requests must be individually approved.
This is just version one. We will continue improving the feature based on feedback from our community. You can join our WhatsApp tester community to give your feedback on the app and request new features: Wandrio Whatsapp-group (or talk about the official rules of tile hunting, like is it allowed to tie your phone to a fishing rod and collect tiles from military bases. We don’t recommend this.)
How to Add a Friend
- Go to your profile page
- Click “Add Friends”
- Search for your friend by name
- Send a follow request
- Once approved, you can access their profile
Click Add Friends
Search with friends name
I found Oiva!
Onve Oiva accepts my friend request, I can see his stats in the profile page.
IBy clicking “Tiles”, you can see your friend’s tiles.
By clicking your own profile picture, you can view your own tiles and directly compare the differences. This makes route planning significantly easier.
Friends Feature Opens Major Possibilities
Without friends, Wandrio is primarily a personal exploration journey.
With friends, it becomes:
- A shared strategy game
- A social competition
- A comparison-driven motivation system
Comparing Legend, Finder, and Mayor statuses adds meaning. The social layer is often what separates a good product from a growing platform.
The Friends-feature is not just a feature. It lays a foundation for many new features, such as:
- Shared (automatic) route planning
- Group challenges
- Tile hunting events
- Team-based leaderboards
- Global leaderboards
- Game seasons
In short the friend feature marks the start of Wandrios journey from solo exploration/adventure tool, to a more social exploration platform. Social features make you more likely to spend more time outdoors and move more. And this is what we at Wandrio want to do. Exploration makes us feel good, and we want to share this feeling.
To support this, we have also added new easily shareable images into your notification emails, so you can show your non-tile hunting friends, where you have been and encourage them to join you.
From your profile settings you can also let Wandrio automatically post the tile hunting stats from your newest adventure to Strava.td
Automatic Route Planning
We’ve also started developing a dedicated route planning feature. The first version is currently in internal testing, and it has already proven extremely useful in our own tile hunting adventures. With just a couple of clicks we can make routes that go to the tiles we need to gather.
We aim to release it to public testing as soon as possible. At the moment, the biggest challenge is the per-unit cost generated by routing calculations, but we are actively working on solving that. Hopefully this can be released in the following weeks.
Happy tile hunting!
