What is Munzee?
...it’s a 21st century scavenger hunt played outdoors where items (Munzees) are found and captured using your smartphone. It’s similar to another geo-location hunt-and-seek game, but only tremendously better and exponentially more fun and rewarding. One of the main objects in the game, and perhaps the most popular, is gaining levels and rising up through the ranks. It’s easy to chart your progress, as all gameplay is transmitted to Munzee HQ electronically through your smartphone’s app. The data is then automagically transcribed into bragging rights level charts, rankings, top 100 lists and almost any other stat you can think of and posted on their website. If competition runs in your blood, so does Munzee. You earn points to level up through the ranks in three basic ways:
By deploying Munzees (placing munzees out in the world for other players to find)
By capturing Munzees (finding munzees other players have deployed and scanning them with your Smartphone’s Munzee App)
Receiving residual points everytime a player captures one of the munzees you’ve deployed.
There are also many ways to play Munzee that are not points or competition oriented. If you’re not concerned with earning points and rising through the ranks, or being able to outscore your spouse (danger Will Robinson), or seeing your name at the top of the leaderboards, Munzee is still for you. Social Munzees, Special Capture Icons, creating personal munzee trails combined with your favorite pursuits, visiting places you haven’t seen. Munzee can be adapted to however you enjoy playing the game.
You’ve seen them. They’re everywhere. Those little white squares filled with black modules. They sorta look like the mazes you used to draw when you were a kid. Well, they’re not mazes, they’re not geekaffiti, and they’re not a government conspiracy tracking your whereabouts (as far as we know). They’re called QR Codes, which stands for Quick Response Code. They’re basically a type of matrix barcode (an optically machine-readable label that records information related to that item), which was first designed for the automotive industry in Japan. They can be read by an imaging device (such as a smartphone), processed and then translated into information which mere humans can understand. They’ve become ubiquitous little devils, you find them everywhere. They’re in your cereal, on the bus, hanging on chains around the neck of your pet, on your underwear, on restaurant menus, in state prisons and in almost every ad you see in print. Marketers, trackers, document managers and computer geeks love them.
And then there’s these four guys from Texas. They’d seen the writing on the wall, or rather, the QR codes. Back in 2008, they brainstormed an idea for a geo-location game that utilized QR Codes as game pieces and they called it “Munzee,” (the name created from the German word for coin, Münze). The game launched in July of 2011 and currently has players in over 50 different countries and a munzee on every contintent.
What the heck is WallaBee?
What do Munzees look like?
Munzees come in many different shapes and sizes, but each one must contain a QR Code. It’s the QR Code combined with your GPS coordinates that are the essential gameplay elements of Munzee. The vast majority of munzees are printed on weatherproof stickers and many players enjoy spicing up their munzees with different designs and wording. But munzees can also be created on dog tag style metal discs, or custom plastic shapes, on magnets, buttons, almost anything you can think of. Munzees can be placed in plain sight, camoflauged, or hidden in containers, it’s all up to the person deploying.
Some of 1849's favorite Deployment spots
To sign up for a free account and learn more, click HERE to visit the Munzee site.
To read 1849's Munzee Travel Mlog, click HERE.
“Listen for the color of the sky. Look for the sound of the hummingbird’s wings. Search the air for the perfume of ice on a hot day. If you have found these things, you will have found Munzee.”
