About tally.place
The world is divided into pentagons about 50 metres across: a garden, say, or a bus stop, or a short stretch of pavement. Every one of them keeps two numbers: how many different people have ever been in it, and how many visits there have been in total.
That is the whole game. Go somewhere and the count goes up. Go somewhere nobody has been and you are the first person ever recorded there, which is worth exactly nothing and is still quite good.
How you win
Three ways, on three separate boards that are never added together, because the people who are good at them are not the same people.
- Reach: how many different pentagons you have ever been in. Distance wins.
- Rarity: ground hardly anyone else has reached. One remote pentagon beats a thousand on the high street.
- Depth: the same streets, over and over. The school run is a strategy.
However you get around
On foot, on a bike, in a car, on a train. Start a session, put the phone down and go: it wants no attention at all, records with the screen locked, and stops by itself when the time you set runs out. There is nothing to tap at a junction and nothing to keep awake.
A commute picks up hundreds of pentagons, and the roads you drive every week keep climbing. Trains and buses count too, though anything moving fast enough to be a train or a plane is counted for Reach only, so a long-haul flight cannot outscore a year of going about.
Nothing is owned
A pentagon you have counted is not yours, and nobody can take one off you, because there is nothing to take. Pentagons have no capacity: ten thousand people can be counted in the same one and every one of them counts in full. Somebody following your exact route all week does not cost you a thing.
Why you cannot record here
You can read this site, but you cannot record on it. Browsers stop reporting a location the moment the tab goes to the background or the screen locks. And more to the point, a browser cannot prove it is really where it says it is, since faking a location is a menu item. First is first forever, so a faked first would be forever too.
Recording happens in the app, which can prove it is a real copy on a real phone. This site shows what the counters already say.
Where you go stays yours
Your coordinates never leave your phone. They become pentagon numbers on the device, and the rest is discarded. There is no page anywhere, for anybody, that lists one person's pentagons, and no times of day are ever published. Anywhere you would rather not count, you mark as private, and it never leaves the phone at all.
The privacy page sets all of that out properly, including what is kept, for how long, and how to take it all back.
The counts are the real ones
Every pentagon is 1,979 m², everywhere on Earth, and shows its true visit count however large or small. Nothing is rounded, padded or capped. A pentagon somebody crosses every day will look like it, and it will not say who, or when, or where else they have been.
If a pentagon's count gives away somewhere people live, you can report it from the app and a human will look at it.