No app · no player account
Nobody installs anything, and that changes the first ten minutes
Thirty people in a car park. Four have no storage left, two have forgotten their store password, one is on a work phone that forbids installs. The hunt has not started and you have already lost a quarter of an hour.
What a player actually does
Two ways in, and both land on the same screen. Neither goes through a store.
A link
You send it by message, by email, or you show a QR code on a sheet. It opens in the browser that is already on the phone.
Or six characters
The party code works from the hunt address. It is the one you end up shouting across the car park when somebody has lost their link.
And nothing else
No account, no password, no email address. A nickname, a team, and the game starts.
What it changes on the day
The stragglers catch up
Someone arriving twenty minutes late joins from the car park in the time it takes to read a code. No download on a saturated network.
A work phone is not a problem
Company handsets often forbid installing anything. A browser is never forbidden, which is why an offsite is where this matters most.
Nothing is left behind
When the hunt is archived, there is nothing to uninstall and no account left anywhere. It matters for children in particular, who leave nothing at all.
What it costs, because it costs something
A browser is not a native app, and pretending otherwise would be found out on the ground. Three limits, and what the game does about each.
No icon on the home screen
The link has to be kept, or the code retyped. In practice one player per team keeps it open, and the others follow that phone.
No vibration on iPhone
The web has no vibration on iOS, so the radar is down to two channels there instead of three. That is precisely why it never relies on one alone: the screen warms, the sound rises, the vibration joins in where it can.
The camera goes through the browser
It works, and it sometimes struggles: low light, a wet sticker, an old handset. Every label therefore carries a five-character code that can be typed by hand, without I, O, 0 or 1.
Why most of the others ask for an app
Because it is easier to build, and because a store install gives an address to write to later. The trade is paid by the players, once each, on a car park, and it is the organiser who watches it happen.
Our own game is built for the browser, service worker included, so what is already loaded stays available when the network dies at the far end of the park. See how it works
The quickest way to check is to run one
Build a hunt on the free plan and open the player link on your own phone. That is the whole demonstration, and it takes an evening.