Gamifying the gamification! A team cooked up Fourcraft, a mashup of Foursquare and Risk, at this weekend’s Game Hack Day at General Assembly.
If you don’t know what Risk is, you might be on the wrong blog, but for the sake of our international audience, it’s a classic board game where players build armies and battle to control territories around the globe.
Fourcraft reimagines that global battle as a war for control of the five boroughs. First off you have to swear allegiance to one of the five borough (Brooknam for life, baby!).
Checking into a neighborhood is the equivalent of placing an army on the board. An algorithm decides who owns each territory and there are currently about 500 players battling for inter-borough supremacy, with Manhattan claiming the most team members and Staten Island the least.
Interestingly, co-founder Ricky Robinett sees this as a way to extend the life and meaning of a Foursquare check-in. ““We wanted to make Foursquare more compelling for long-term use,” says Ricky Robinett, told Mashable “[On Foursquare] you have a weekly total that gets swiped at the end of the week. This keeps adding up.”
Robinett told Betabeat that he and the founding team definitely plan to support and promote the game beyond this initial build. “We want to give players more information about what’s happening in a specific battle. We have the data, but we haven’t surfaced it yet.”
Right now Brooklyn has grabbed three territories in lower Manhattan, while Manhattan as three in Brooklyn, plus the strategically vital fort of Governors Island. Betabeat is willing to lead the check-in assault on Governor’s Island this weekend, who’s with us?
