GeoSus

Find the Saboteur. On real streets.

A hidden-traitor game you play outside with friends. Your phone's GPS is the board.

A street map with players walking A paper street map with a grid of streets. Five blue dots walk along the streets, one yellow square marks a task spot, and one of the blue dots has a small red mark that the others do not have. 1 2

GeoSus is a hidden-role game for a group of friends, played outdoors. Your phone shows a map of the park you are standing in. Your real position is your controller. Nobody sits at a desk.

Read the safety notice first

Who makes this

I am Bandwidth, one person, and I make this in my spare time. GeoSus is a hobby project with no company behind it. That is why it is best effort: it can break or be down, and I fix it when I can.

It is in closed testing and has no store listing yet. If you want to try it with your group, write to info@bandwidthyt.com.

BANDWIDTH

Original proof of concept was created by my amazing students at the children's university of the technical university in Liberec.

How a round works

  1. One person creates a lobby and picks the play area on the map. Everyone else joins with a short code.
  2. The server secretly picks a few players to work against the rest. Everyone else gets tasks at real spots in the park.
  3. Walk to a task spot, then solve a short puzzle on your phone. The map does not show you where other players are.
  4. Found something suspicious? Call a Huddle. Everyone walks back to the base, talks it through, and votes.
  5. The round ends when the honest players finish every task, or when the others have caught up with enough of them. A round takes about 15 minutes.

What it looks like

The play screen with the street map of a park, my marker, a numbered task marker, the distance to the next task, and Role, Help and Huddle buttons.
Walk to the marker on the map.
A task puzzle where a thumb rubs grime off a plate, with a progress bar.
At the spot, a short puzzle.
The Huddle voting screen with a timer, four player names to vote for and a Skip button.
Huddle: talk it through, then vote.
The end screen with the winning side, four labelled stats for one player, the player list with roles, and a plain timeline of what happened.
The end: who won, and what happened.

Screenshots from a desktop test build, not a phone.

Data use

A 30-minute game uses about 1.4 MB of mobile data per player: roughly 0.4 MB up and 1 MB down. The map is one 65 KB download at the start, there are no map tiles to stream.

0.4 MBup
1 MBdown
1.4 MBper player, 30 minutes

Same for 4 or 8 players. On the socket I measured 0.26 MB up and about 0.7 MB down; the rest is an estimate for encryption and network headers. Bots on a local server, not a phone.

What you need

What it does not do