Why Sign In to Plates Across America®?

Plates Across America™ provides a demo of its single-player game so that you can know if you would be interested in playing. We know that signing up for a new, possibly unknown service makes a lot of people nervous. However, the two-player racing game is not available in the demo and requires signing into our game. Why? 

There's a much longer article that could be written with the technical details, but the short answer is:

to improve security and prevent abuse. 

Once you provide the ability for more than one person to interact on a website, the potential for it to become a problem grows significantly. You would not be playing our game for very long if people started harassing you, whether it be with malicious intent, offensive content or trying to sell you something. 

Requiring people to log in, and verifying their email, provide a first defense to prevent anonymous people from doing bad things. As a second line of defense, even if some "bad actors" do sign up and begin to behave badly, we have the ability to block their account to ensure the abuse is stopped. Our terms of service outlines what we will not tolerate and ensures we have the right to deny access to abusers.

We hope this explanation gives you a better understanding of why we require signing up to play the more compelling two-person race game. If you are ready to sign up and try out the race game, just visit: 

Plates Across America™ sign-in page

Happy Travels!

Free Games are Not Free

Imagine you are out shopping and are browsing through the aisles of your favorite store. After a while, you glance over and notice someone standing further down the aisle. They are staring at you and holding a clipboard. You were so distracted with what was on your mind that day that you just noticed them and you are not sure how long they have been there. Have they been watching you the whole time?

You bend down to pick something off the bottom shelf to look closer.  As you do this, you notice the person writing something down on the clipboard.  You put the item back, glance over and again, they frantically write some more.  You decide to move on to another aisle to escape their gaze. But they follow you, writing more as they go.

Being a little too creeped out by this person, you leave the store and continue your shopping elsewhere. As you enter the next store, you see that same person by the shopping carts. Again, looking at you and scribbling more on their clipboard. It's like the Twilight Zone. You leave the store immediately to drive home, now sufficiently frazzled.

As you drive, you are consumed with the thought of this person following you. Who were they? Why were they following? What were they writing? How did they know where I was going?

As you calm down a bit, you peek in the rear-view mirror. You see this person is now sitting in the back seat of your car. Startled, you scream. You pull over, demand they get out of the car and hand over the clipboard. You see that they have written down your every action. Every store you visited, product you touched, every turn you made in your car, how long you stopped at each stop sign, the radio station you are listening to and which songs you sung along to. The clipboard contains a record of your every action and behavior throughout the day.

The Internet

How would you feel if something like that scenario happened to you in real life?  Would you be tolerate someone recording your every move no matter where you went? Would you allow them to follow you around all day? Would you be happy if that person was selling your information to anyone and everyone willing to pay for it?

Aside from the physical person and clipboard, that scenario is exactly what happens to you every day on the Internet and with almost every web site you visit.  The only difference is that the person with the clipboard is invisible (unless you know how to look). What nearly no one would tolerate in their physical life is being allowed to happen with their on-line life. Practically speaking, there is really no difference between these two scenarios nowadays.

There is a multi-billion dollar market in buying and selling your personal data and that of every other person on the planet. Most web sites participate in either writing on that clipboard, or buying the data it contains.

Should companies with web sites be allowed to

• track your every move;
• share that data with anyone they please; or
• combine that data with the data from all other companies?

Not only do most web sites do this, it is currently deemed as the "right way" to run a web-based company.  The industry acceptance practice dictates that you are not entitled to any privacy. They all put "tracking pixels" on their site which enables them to see your every move. This is not limited to simple things like which web sites you visited, but can include recording every movement of your mouse, where you hover over, for how long and where you click.  The most valuable asset for these companies is the log of all your personal actions.

Free Games

There is a well-known phrase:

"If the product is free, then you are the product."

This perfectly sums up what is going on with the "free" games out there. These are provided by companies that participate in this anti-privacy web culture.  You give up your privacy, they sell your data and you get to play for free.  What we like to say is that for these "free" games:

"They are only free if you do not put any value on your privacy."

Why does it Matter?

Humans are flawed. We can be manipulated to do things that do not make sense, that we do not need to do or even that we do not want to do. Most people would like to think they are immune to this, but no one is. Even the smartest psychologists, who are experts on the topic, admit that even they are susceptible to manipulation even when they know it is happening.  A good reference on the topic is: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini.

Deeply ingrained into our mental machinery are things that make us vulnerable to being manipulated. You and I are no match for the corporations that are peddling our private data.  They have got the manipulation game refined to such a level that most people do not even notice it happening. The ramifications are scary. The fact that most people are not aware of this, or do not care about it, is even scarier.

Privacy-focused, Family Values

At Plates Across America™, we do not not engage in any of these unsavory practices and we promise never to do so. The game was conceived, designed and developed by a family (wife, husband and daughter) with the philosophy that we should treat you the way we would want our family members to be treated. We are not interested in selling your data or exploiting you in any way.  We will not annoy you with advertisements, excessive emails, newsletters, on-line tracking, solicitations or any of the other nonsense most other companies seem to think is an acceptable way to treat you.

Focusing on privacy and respecting your inbox means rejecting the current accepted practices of the industry.  This is like trying to swim upstream in a roaring rapids. However, just because it is hard does not mean we cannot try.  We like to think it is only a matter of time before there is a rejection of the current norms and that we will be on the right side of history. Change has to start somewhere, so maybe our efforts can contribute to this in some small way.

Nothing Hidden

We charge a fee for our game because we think the honest way of doing business involves a fair exchange without any hidden costs (such as giving up your privacy).  We aim to provide hours of entertainment, and we only hope for a very small fee in return.

A movie gives 2 hours of entertainment and costs $10. A cup of coffee costs nearly $3 and lasts less than a hour.  Our game costs less than both of those and provides many, many more hours of entertainment.

We do not try to trick you into buying the game. We provide a demo version so you can understand whether it has any appeal to you, and then a generous free trial period that gives you access to the full game and all its features. Only then, once you know exactly what we have to offer, do we ask whether you feel it provides enough value to justify the cost.

We encourage you to try our game and support the idea that privacy-focused companies can succeed. 

Start with our free demo:

Play the Free Demo Game

Happy Travels!

Answer Scoring in Plates Across America®

The main premise of Plates Across America® is to complete a route in as few puzzles as possible. The general rule is:

The longer the answer, the further you travel. 

If you play the game in our "Race Mode", at the end of the race it will show all the puzzles with your and your opponent's answers side-by-side (see image at right). If you compare the scores, you might see something that does not match the "longer is better" rule. That is because there are some exceptions to that rule. This article explains the nuances of how we calculate the scores to help explain when the rule does and does not apply.  

Lemmas

The word "lemma" has multiple meanings, but here we mean it to be the "root" of word. For example: "wanders", "wandered" and "wandering" are related words and share the same lemma word "wander".  This concept is important in the scoring because we reward a good vocabulary more than someone's ability to creatively add extra letters (also known as "stemming" words). For example, someone should not get a higher score than you just because they to added a trailing "s" to pluralize the word.

Plurals

The important part of understanding how plurals are scored is awareness that there are two different cases.

• Case (1) Both the plural form and that word's lemma both match. In this case, pluralizing the word is somewhat superfluous and is only really serving to increase the letter count.
• Case (2) The lemma of the word does not match and the pluralized form is required to be a valid answer. i.e., the ending "s" is required to make the word match.

For Case (1), the plural answer will be scored the same as the singular.  There is no penalty for using the plural form, but also there is no credit for the extra letters.

For Case (2), the plural answer will be ranked below all the other non-plural answers whose lemmas match the puzzle. For example, if the puzzle is "BDS", then "bedside" would score higher than "bedazzles" even though "bedside" has fewer letters. It is far easier to find a word with "B" and "D" and to pluralize it then it is to find a non-plural word with "B", "D" and "S".

Word Frequency

Once all the possible solution words are sorted out by whether they or not they are lemmas and their lengths, the next thing we consider is the word's frequency.  All other things being equal, the less frequently occurring words will score higher than more common, everyday words.

For example, for the puzzle "ADT", the word "audit" would score higher than "adult" even though they both have 5 letters. The word "audit" is not used as frequently as the word "adult" in normal usage. Note that the score advantage based on word frequency is not as dramatic as it is for the lemma vs. non-lemma case: it provides some advantage, but the word length scoring is more important.

Summary

Though word length is the prime element in determining the quality of the answer, it is not the only factor. Understanding the nuances of scoring will help you finish routes faster and score better in the game.

If you have not tried the game, and are interest, here's a link:

Game Demo

Happy Travels!

Interesting Puzzle Stats

If you have played Plates Across America™ and understand how the game's word puzzles work, you might have asked yourself questions, like "How many puzzles are there?".  In this post, we try to provide some interesting facts about the underlying puzzle data. In case you have not yet played the game, we'll first briefly go over how the puzzles work, however you could also familiarize yourself with the game by trying the free demo here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com/demo

 

Puzzle Rules

A "puzzle" is three letters, where the order matters. A valid answer to the puzzle is a dictionary word in which those three puzzle letters appear and are in that same order. The letters do not have to be consecutive within the word and can appear anywhere as long as the ordering is not violated. Some examples:

Puzzle	Valid Answers
ABT	about, tabletop, bicarbonate
IOL	idol, airfoil, antisocial

Most important to the game is that (generally) the longer answers are worth more than shorter answers. The longer the answer, the further you travel with each puzzle. The goal is to try to cover the distance in a route with the fewest possible puzzles.

There are a few nuances to the scores assigned to the answers so that it is not always strictly that longer ones score higher. For instance, if you just add an "s" to the end of a word to pluralize it, that would have the same value as the non-pluralized word even though it has one more letter. The full run-down of all the scoring rules will be covered in a future blog post.

The Dictionary

The puzzles are derived from the words in the game's dictionary. We built this dictionary trying to cover the most common word usages. For example, though the dictionary does include a lot of medical terminology, it is not trying to be comprehensive to cover all the more esoteric words. 

Our dictionary is not perfect, which is why we provide an in-game feature to allow players to tell us when they find something we are missing. Here's a picture of the "Report Word" link we show in the game:

So, how big is our dictionary? As of this writing, it has 98,614 words. Every week, we add more as our players report words that should be added to the dictionary.

The Puzzles

All the puzzles we show in the game have at least one valid dictionary word as its answer. In theory, there are 26 * 26 * 26 = 17,576 different 3 letter combinations. However, not all these combinations have a matching word, e.g., "WZX". In the end, there are only a total of 14,863 puzzles in our game. 

Some other facts:

• For the two example puzzles given above, ABT has 1,045 matching words and and IOL has 2,075.
• The puzzle with the most matches is IES with 18,080 different matching words.

The Answers

If you add up all the valid answers across all of the 14,863 puzzles, you would get that there are 8,071,767 total answers.  That means that the average puzzle has 543 valid answers.

Other facts:

• With a dictionary of 96,614 words, this means that the average word matches 82 puzzles.
• Since a valid answer must contain at least 4 characters, the fewest puzzles a word can match turns out to be 3. e.g., The word "pool" only matches POO, POL, and OOL.

Parting Thoughts

We hope you found this small sample of game statistics interesting.  If you have questions or think of anything related to the game's data that you are interested in, please let us know.

Happy Travels!

Need a Shot of Adrenaline? The Race Game Puzzle Timer

The most controversial feature (as measured by our company's internal squabbles) was the addition of the puzzle timer.  Should a player be allowed as much time as they want to come up with an answer, or should we put a cap on how much time they have?

The designer that came up with this idea felt that a timer was essential to improving the game play. She felt like tough puzzles was causing her to get frustrated. Her personality is such that she was not willing to give in to defeat, so would continue to stew on an answer and get more and more frustrated.  She felt that it would be a relief to be forced to move on after some time.

On the other hand, many of our early test players enjoyed the more leisurely pace of the game and having time to think. Since the game has you traveling the country, shouldn't you be in control of when you travel, where you go and how fast you get there?

Both of these "camps" had very good arguments for their positions.  We were not going to add the feature until we were completely convinced it was important, so we sat on the idea for a long time, reconsidering it often. This debate began prior to our initial release, and went through many months after our initial launch (March of 2020). 

As we discussed in a previous article, when we launched the game, we only offered a single-player option, then began working on the two-player "Race" game a couple months after launch. The puzzle timer question lingered.  However, about half-way through the design of the Race game it had become fairly clear that the timer was going to be essential for the two-player game.

Why the Timer Matters

Suppose you like the game, but since you have a busy life, the amount of game play time you have is limited. Suppose you have an independently wealthy friend who also likes the game. With much more leisure time on their hands, your friend will have a distinct advantage if they race you: they can contemplate answers for much more time than you can.  

The timer levels the playing field, while also putting a cap on how long a game is going to last. Thus, it provides both fairness and predictability, both of which we felt were essential in the race version of the game.

Once we committed to the design and engineering effort to add the timer feature for the two-player game, we had no choice but to revisit this question for the single player game. We ultimately decided to leave the timer out of the single player game. Since our internal factions were so divided, and since we felt the general population could have similar sentiments, providing the choice of un-timed single player mode and timed race mode could keep both types of players happy.

Pausing the Timer

Have you ever tried to interrupt someone while they are in the middle of a time-based game? The reaction you get can be a function of the person's personality, but it can often be less than civilized.  From the player's perspective, life does have a way of making "things" happen, and you might need to interrupt the game to take care of such "things".  It would be a better game if you did not have to choose between tending to life and winning a game.

To address these concerns, we added the ability to pause the game.  This game pause does not happen immediately though, but only after the current puzzle.  This was done to guard against a player using the pause function to gain an unfair advantage. We are not 100% enamored with the current design of this feature, so we may revisit this, but for now it provides the main pausing function we felt we needed.

How Much Time?

Once we committed to adding a puzzle timer, the obvious question is, "How much time should a player get for each puzzle?"  Originally, we had no idea.  We started with 25 seconds and this nearly led to riots.  If you are an adrenaline junkie, this might be your sort of game, but we unleashed 25 seconds on a set of beta testers who were more of a meticulous, laid back mind-set and who were also used to the original version and having all the time in the world. It was a brutal culture shock for them.

The most obvious place to go from there was a 1 minute timer. This turned out to be a fair amount of time: enough to let you think and reconsider, but not so much time that you do not feel any time pressure.

Adrenaline Anyone?

A final note about that stress-inducing 25 second timer we experimented with: we are contemplating making this a game option. We would call it something like "Sprint" mode and it would definitely liven things up a bit. We are not sure how much demand there might be for something like this, so if you think this would be of interest, please let us know.

Play Plates Across America

Happy Travels!

It's a Small World

In the early days of our game development at Plates Across America™, like many software companies, we relied on our friends and family to help test early versions. One of the more engaging aspects of playing in this small universe of people is that you personally know everyone appearing in the leader boards.

While we were enjoying the close-knit nature of the early versions of the game, our game designers began to worry that this element would be lost once we reached a certain number of players. In any game with a large distribution, there are always people that wind up being on a different level than everyone else. If you have a million players, how many are going to care to look at the leader boards besides the handful of people that have any chance of being listed there?

The design solution we came up with to address this issue was to allow you to filter the leader boards to only a select set of chosen people. This requires being about to find and "follow" people to build up the list of those you are interested in. Adding the ability to find and manage a list of users is no small development effort. If you have not written or designed software before, then you might not appreciate the level of effort required to add something like this, though it sounds simple on the surface.  

This was a sizable body of work we identified before we had even launched Plates Across America. Since we figured it was more important to focus on getting the first 100 customers before we starting to worry about the millionth, we shelved this idea of "filtered" leader boards for a while.  

If you read our previous article on issues we faced when we introduced the two-player race mode, you will have noticed that the race feature required this same need to maintain a list of people you are following (so you can more easily locate race partners). This shared need of the "follow" feature made it no coincidence that the race feature and filtered leader boards feature launched at the same time.

To use this feature, you first find and/or invite friends in the game to build up your "following" list. Then, when you visit the leader boards, you can select the drop-down menu (top left) to show only those you are following. The game remembers this choice, so all leader boards will filter down to your list unless you switch the view back.

Another useful feature we have added is to put a yellow star next to the users you are following so you can quickly identify those people you are most interested in. If you play the game and have any feedback on this feature, please let us know.   Play Plates Across America

Happy Travels!

Ready, Set, Race?

We recently introduced a two-player "race" version of Plates Across America™. To do this we needed to add a number of other features to solve the problem of how to find race opponents. In our previous blog post, we explained the matching process when you choose to "Race Anyone" and in this article we describe what we considered when you want you to pick a specific opponent.

If you do not care who your race opponent is, this is the easiest thing for us to handle. When two people choose this option, we have mutual consent, so we can match them and the race can start. But there are some tricky parts once you entertain the notion that a user should be allowed to pick the race opponent.

1. How do players find the opponents they want to race?
2. How do we ensure that the selected opponent is willing to race?

We wanted to tackle both these problems with care, since we value our customer's privacy and have made a promise to not become yet another source of annoying emails. The typical things game companies do for situations like this are definitely not aligned with our core values, so we could not just blindly copy what others are doing.

Finding Users

There are two principle ways you can select a particular player to race in the game:

1. if you see them in the leader boards (click on their icon); or
2. from the newly added page of players you are "following".

The leader boards already had the user's name/icon and allowed you to click to see some of their stats. All we had to do was add a "RACE" button to that view of a user. It is simple to pick them this way, but there are some issues to be addressed about their willingness to participate and how we should notify them. We discuss those issues little further below.

The "Following" page is a new feature we added to make it easy to locate known players. This immediately brought up the need to allow you to manage this list: e.g., searching for, adding and removing players in the list. If you see a player you know on the leader boards and click their icon, the newly added "FOLLOW" button can be used. 

Finding Friends

The much more desirable method is to locate people you already know, e.g., friends, family and acquaintances. Here is where it starts to get tricky.

• How do you locate them?  By their game username?  By their email address?
• What if they are not signed up for the game?
• Is emailing the user in accordance with our "no annoying emails" policy?
• What if someone else has already invited them, but they have not signed up?
• What if they signed up and they prefer to not get any more emails like this?

We wrestled with these questions and came up with our "Find Friends" search page. We wanted this to be as easy as possible, so you can type in, free form, multiple user names and/or email addresses and we'll do the work to sort this out and provide you with the available options. If the user is already signed up, you get a "FOLLOW" button. If not, we give you the option of inviting them. You must know their email address and choose to email them before we will send out an email. We will not email someone for you unless you know their email address. Most importantly, we will never show your email address to anyone.

Requesting a Race

Just because someone wants to race you, does not mean you want to race them. If we allow the race to start and you choose not to participate, then there is the risk of that person wasting their time playing a game that is a dead end. Therefore, we introduced the notion that before you can race someone, you must first get their consent. This is just a one time request, and once consent has been granted, we assume there is a mutual agreement and that all subsequent race requests will allow the game to start immediately. 

What happens if you consent and then the playing partner becomes a nuisance? We needed to also add a "BLOCK USER" feature to handle this case.

Notifications

We struggled designing how to notify users when someone requests a race.  If we do not send a notification and if you were interested, then the burden is on you to continually check back with the game. If we do send notifications, and you are not interested, then we might be annoying you with emails, which is what we have promised we would not do.

We also struggled with how to deal with having opt-in emails. We did not want to default users to getting emails, since that is against the spirit of what we promised, but we also want to make it easy for users to get notified of these game invites. We hit upon a good balance by making the emails opt-in and by asking about the email option at the point of race requesting. This allows you to opt-in and understand its benefits immediately, in context. In your user settings, you can control this email setting so can opt out at any time if you change your mind.

The key elements of this notification design are:

• emails are opt-in and you can opt-out at any time;
• we only solicit you to opt-in when it matters to the action you are taking;
• we require a real human user to initiate an email (no automated spamming allowed);
• you can block particular users; and
• even if you opt-in, we limit game reminder emails to at most once a day. 

Summary

All these issues about simply finding race partners required considerable design and development work and that is not including the race feature game play itself. This large body of work is why the race feature was not in our initial release of Plates Across America and had to wait until now to be available. We are very pleased that we were finally able to make this feature available. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Sign in to Try the Race Game

Happy Travels!

The Logic Behind: Race Anyone

Plates Across America's(TM) new two-person race feature allows you to select opponents in one of two ways: 

1. you can either locate a particular user and challenge them to a race, or 
2. you can choose to race "anyone" and allow the game to find a matching opponent.  

This article is about how we automatically find matching players.

Plates Across America(TM) attracts a broad spectrum of people and skill levels. Playing against someone that is far less or far more skilled than you are is usually not very enjoyable. To add a more competitive nature to the game, we want to match up people with the same relative skill level. 

Matching Algorithm

While designing the matching feature, the first tricky design decision we faced was how to trade-off the precision of skill level matching with how long a player would want to wait to begin playing a game. Most times, people would prefer to play sooner rather than waiting a long time for the perfect match.  We achieved this balance using an iterative solution that starts with a narrow band of skill ranges and broadens the search when no matches are found. It stops when a match is found or if the skill differential becomes too great.

Skill level

When we do the matching, we first need to assign each user a "skill level" based upon their game play history. The main attributes we look at are the quality of answers and the percentage of correct answers. Each puzzle answer get a "strength" score which translates into miles traveled. Further, each incorrect answer results in a loss of miles traveled. These two stats tend to be a good indicator of how many puzzles it will take to complete a race: the player with the fewest puzzles wins the race.

We will look at a player's stats over their previous races, though we use their single-person game stats if they have not yet completed in many races. For a brand new user, with no game play stats would have a skill level of "0".  A very good player, averaging 2.5 miles per puzzle, would have a skill level near "25".

As of this writing, we only have experience with this matching algorithm using a relatively small player base. There's plenty of more sophisticated approaches we could have used, but we've opted to start with something simple and we'll refine it when needed. If you have any feedback on how this algorithm is working, good or bad, please let us know.

Sign in to Play the Race Game

Happy travels!

Race Achievement Badges

With the Plates Across America's® new Race Game feature we recently launched, we have added a couple new achievement badges.  Our previous, single-player game achievement badges look like this:

The new, two-player "Race Game" achievement badges are:

• The Racing Club badge shows your achievement level for race game participation.
• The Champions Circle badge is awarded based on how many races you have won.

Try the single-player demo here: Plates Across America Demo Page

Or sign in to try out the new two-player Race game: Plates Across America Signin Page

Improve Your Scores with Race Answer Feature

Race Completed Page

With the release of Plates Across America®'s new Race game feature, we also introduced a new "Race Completed" page. This new page becomes accessible after both players have completed the race. This page shows the outcome, stats for the race, your stats against this opponent as well as the full puzzle and answer history. It is the Answers feature of this page that we felt was worth writing a little more about.

Answers Feature

As we were discussing the design for the Race feature, once this idea was proposed, we all immediately felt that it would be incredibly interesting and useful to be able to compare your answers with your opponent's answers. You can use this to improve your game or just to see what sorts of words your opponent decides to use.

This comparison works well since each player is shown exactly the same puzzle sequence, so you can really compare apples-to-apples (so to speak).  Notice that one user may see more puzzles if they require more to complete the route.

We think Answers comparison is one of the more interesting features of the new Race game. If you try it out, please let us know what you think.

        Visit Plates Across America®'s site: Sign in to Race

Head to Head Race Game

We just finished deploying the most significant release since we first launched Plates Across America™. We'll cover all the changes and new features in a series of short articles. The most important addition in this release, by far, and the one that this article covers is the new "Race Game" feature.

Play Plates Across America ® here

Original Race Game Concept 

The first version of the Race Game feature existed long before we released Plates Across America and it was quite different from what we now have.  The original feature allowed up to 8 players and offered in-game chat messages.  It was set up to be much more like a "live" race with entry fees and prizes for the top 3 finishers. This was a pretty interesting "race-like" idea, but not very practical for this type of (somewhat leisurely) word game.

Requiring all players to be on-line at the same time and to remain for the duration of the game was a bit too constraining for a word game.  We ditched this idea before the first release and decided to launch the game with just the solo "Travel" mode.  Meanwhile, in the background, our game designers were re-thinking how to reintroduce a multi-player version back into the game.

2 Person Race Game

For the publicly available race feature we just released, we now have a 2 person race game which allows you to play a specific person, or you can allow us to find a matching race partner (we'll discuss how we pick partners in a future article). For fairness, each player will get the exact same sequence of puzzles in a race and they can completed it at their own pace. The winner of the Race is the person who completes the route in the fewest possible puzzles. If there's a tie on the puzzle count, the percent correct score is used as a tie-breaker, and if that too is the same, the game ends in a tie.

Choice of Race Game Length

Another nice feature is the ability to select your preferred race length. The choices are: short, medium, long and extra long.  The race route will be chosen randomly from the routes based on their distance and your preference.

We are very excited about the release of this new Race feature. We have known this would be an important addition to Plates Across America and have worked hard to get this out as soon as we could. We hope you are able to try it out and that you find it enjoyable.

Why Do I See an Alaska license plate?

Want to know how Plates Across America™ decides which license plate to show in the game? If so, then read on for all the nitty-gritty details. First, we will give you a some hints on some upcoming features since they are directly related to license plates.

Which License Plates?

Every state (and D.C.) can have multiple license plates. Further, each license plate has two important attributes: 1) what years the license plate was in use; and 2) how common the license plate was during that time.  In our early versions of the game, neither of these is much of a factor since we only have a single plate for each state. However, we are working on extending the set of license plates in the game and will be working this into some interesting new route concepts.

With that as some background, when a new puzzle is displayed, exactly what happens to decide which license plate to show? First, we look at your avatar's current location in the game. Most of the time, you get a plate from the state your avatar is in (and eventually the "time" you are in). If there is more than one plate for the state (and time), then we'll randomly pick one based on how common it is. To simulate what you might experience in the real world, we look at your immediate location (in the game) and a few mile radius from where you are. When you travel in real life, as you near the borders of states you tend to see plates from the neighboring states more often then if you were in the interior of the state. In the game, the likelihood of seeing a plate from the current state or neighboring state depends on how close you are to the border and the relative populations of cities in that area.

What about Random Out of State License Plates?

Most of the time we look at your avatar's current location, but not all of the time. Ever see a car with an out of state license plate from far away? We simulate this in the game by occasionally picking a state from the other states. In the real world you are more likely to see plates from places like New York, California, Florida, Michigan, etc. because those places simply have more people which increases the likelihood that a visitor is from there. It is much less likely to see a plate from North Dakota given how few people live there.  Therefore, when the game does decide to pick from other states, it does so based upon the relative populations of the states.

So there you have it, the full details of how the license plates get picked in Plates Across America™.

Increase Your Score with Skip and Boost Features

With today's release, we've introduced a set of new features that really improve the game play. The screenshot at right shows a few of the new ones including "Welcome to" signs plus skip and boost tokens. If you are new to Plates Across America™ you can play a live demo here:

Free Plates Across America® Demo

New Skip and Boost Features

The "skip" tokens allow you to exchange the word puzzle with another one without penalty. The boost token allows multiplying your reward for a correct answer, but beware, it will also multiply the penalty if you get it wrong.

New Achievement Badges

We have also rolled out a series of achievement recognition badges and a page where you can see all of the badges you have earned. A sample of one of these pages is below. We are really excited about the features in this new  release. We hope you can give Plates Across America® a try to see for yourself.

Mileage Signs in Plates Across America®

We release a minor update of Plates Across America® today which adds road mileage signs. On some of the longer routes, this helps break up the trip and give you a peek into the upcoming cities.

Frequency of Mileage Signs

We tried to make these to increase the sense of travel of the game without being a distraction. This is a balance in how frequently these signs should show up. We also did not want to manually generate these signs across all our routes, so we needed some sort of algorithm. We wondered if real civil engineers face a similar problems when they have to decide the signage to put on roads.

We settled on putting the first sign about 10 miles into the route and spacing them about every 30 miles. We think that provides a good distance between them and matches our intuition about what our real-world experiences have been on the road.

Which Cities to Show on Mileage Signs

After we decided where to place the signs, we approached the somewhat more complex decision about "what" should appear on the signs. Which cities warrant being on there and which ones do not? The size of the city certainly matters, but so does its proximity to the current location.  This initially seemed like it could get complicated with a lot of nuances and edge cases. In the end, we found something relatively simpler that seems to do a decent job of mimicking the real world.

We use a two pass solution, looking for major cities first, out to the fixed distance of 120 miles, and then filling in minor cities between the the current location and the first major city. A major city is defined as one that has a population over 250,000.  If there are no major cities in the next 120 miles, we simply take the next 3 largest cities to show.  Simple, but seems to be effective.

Click here to try Plates Across America for free and let us know what you think. 

About Plates Across America®, Our Travel Themed Word Game

Plates Across America® is an online game that combines solving word puzzles which appear on license plates with traveling across the United States along some of its most famous routes.  We provide a free demo which does not require signing up and a free trial of the full game if you register.

Free Plates Across America® Demo

Respect For Privacy

The Plates Across America game is being developed by a family-based startup. We are trying to buck the "free game" trend where the cost is "free" only if you put zero value on your privacy. This might be a tall order in today's Internet environment, but we are going to try. In a world where "Spying on You" is replaced with jargon such as "Analytics" and "Re-targeting", we deliberately avoid tracking your every move. This decision limits the types of data we have access to, but when weighing the value we (the company) get against the cost to our customers of surrendering their privacy, we feel the answer is quite clear.

Word Game with Virtual Travel

We began software development of the game in the Spring of 2019, though the genesis of using license plates as a source of word puzzles goes back many years in our family. By 2019, we thought the clever word puzzle idea combined with aspects of virtual travel would also have some entertainment value for others. Here in the Spring of 2020, as we were getting ready to put out our first release, the global pandemic has hit hard and the world is a very different place. If anything, the popularity of "virtual travel" has increased. Maybe this will increase the value some people find in the game, or at least help them pass their quarantine time more enjoyably. For us personally, developing the game as a family has been much more fun than watching the constant, and often depressing, news cycle.

In its current web-based form, the game is enjoyable for those who like word games. We will be continuing to improve the game play to make it more enjoyable, accessible and hopefully to broaden its appeal. We have a long list of exciting future features and only wish we had enough time to work on all of them.

Happy travels and stay safe!

Notes from Our First Release of Plates Across America®

We reached an important milestone today in the development of the Plates Across America (TM) game. With today's release, we added a very useful interactive free demo and we've completely redesigned the user interface.  Although the first "soft release" happened a few weeks back, today's release is the first one that is ready for more than just friends and family. Feel free to check it out here:

Game Screenshot

Plates Across America Free Game Demo

For those that might be interested in the game's history, the basic premise on the word puzzles stretches back years. This seemed novel and catchy enough that we saw potential. Somewhere around March 2019, the word puzzle idea was combined with the travel theme and the game started to take shape. Initial prototypes and algorithms were developed in the ensuing months, and work toward building the web-based version started in the Summer of 2019.

The web-based version is just the starting point to help us get up and going quickly so we can refine the ideas. Once we feel it is refined enough, we will be creating mobile app versions.

If you try our game, we would love to get your feedback.