Plates Across Americe's® Badges and Achievements

Achievements Page

When you play Plates Across America®, you will earn "badges". Some of these are directly related to the single-player game's Travel Goals, some are earned for achievements in the two-player game and a few others for players that make contributions to the game.

Since it takes a while to accumulate all the different types of badges, we thought it might be interesting for newer players to see the full set of our badges and to find out how each one is awarded. We add new badges from time to time, so there may be new ones by the time you read this article.

Achievement Levels and Coloring

For all the badge types, there is a range of achievement levels. These levels will correspond to some minimum value needed to earn the badge.  As you reach higher threshold values, the color of the badge reflects the increasing achievement level. The coloring scheme for the achievement levels is shown in the image below for the Miles Traveled Badge.

Types of Badges

Miles Traveled Badges

We start with the simplest one to understand: the miles traveled badge. This is based on the total number of miles you have traveled while playing the single player mode. The achievement level thresholds for this badge are 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 and 10000 miles.

Collection Badges

The core concept for winning the single player mode is the "Travel Goal". You can earn Collection Badges as you reach travel goals. Examples of travel goals are:

• states you have traveled through;
• license plates you have collected;
• scenic routes you have traveled; and
• locations you have visited for the different "location types".

Here are examples of some of the badges you can earn as you achieve travel goals.

Location Badges

As you travel in the single player game, you pass through (or near) cities, landmarks and other man-made, natural and geological places of interest. You can collect these places to reach different Travel Goals. The kinds of places you can collect include:

• state capitals, 
• national parks, 
• national monuments, 
• bridges, 
• caves, 
• ghost towns, 
• mountain passes, 
• tunnels, and
• waterfalls.

Two Player Game Badges

When two players compete against each other, we call this a "Race". In a race, each player is given the same 10 puzzles. There is a time limit for each puzzle. The player that enters the best answers wins the race. You can get badges for competing in and winning enough races.

User Contribution Badges

The final set of badges we have are not for in-game achievements, but are for players that have helped improve our game. There are a few ways users can help to improve the game:

Dictionary Words

It is more challenging than you might think to build a good dictionary, and even harder to get a large group of people to agree what should and should not be included in a dictionary. Therefore, we acknowledge that at any point in time, our dictionary will not be complete and it will evolve. Because of this, players can suggest words to be added to our dictionary.  

When your answer is flagged as being incorrect because it is not in our dictionary, we provide a link you can use to submit it to us. We review these submissions and if the word is accepted and added, we acknowledge your contributions with the "Pit Crew" badge.

City Facts Badge

As you travel in the single player game, your pass through and near cities, towns and other locations of interest. To add to the feeling of virtual traveling and to provide players with some interesting context on the places being visited, we have a "City Facts" feature that gives some interesting trivia, facts and history of the locations. 

There are tens of thousands of places across the country, so it is hard to know about each and every one of them.  However, if a player is acquainted with the area, they may know something interesting about it that we do not. In the game, we allow players to contribute and share that knowledge by sending it to us for review.  We will research the suggestion and if it is accepted, we acknowledge the effort with the "Historian" badge and also give attribution to the person that submitted it. 

Early Adopters Badge

Plates Across America® has evolved a lot since the early versions. We constantly iterate to make the game better and better. We can only do that by having real players try out the game and give us feedback.  Some give us explicit feedback, while others provide it indirectly by what they do and do not do as they play the game.  

To thank those people that have played earlier versions, we give them the "Trailblazer" badge.  The earlier a player joined, and the more they have played, the higher the badge level.

Closing Comments

We hope this overview of the game's badges was informative.  If you have never played Plates Across America® before, you can start acquiring badges by playing here:

https://platesacrossamerica.com

Happy Travels!

Plates Across America® Redesign and Lessons Learned

We've been quiet the last couple months with regards to postings about Plates Across America®. We have been actively working on a major redesign of the game and it turned out to be a fair bit of work, complete with periods of "writer's block". We had lots of ideas for the game, but at times struggled to put them together into a coherent game story.

The initial idea we had for Plates Across America® was to combine solving license plate letter puzzles with the feeling of driving across the USA. Our first version of the game wound up being predominantly about the puzzles and it did not give a player a good sense of traveling. The first version was also too open-ended, requiring the players to determine what their ultimate goal was. The next version of the game seeks to solve these shortcomings.

We've had over a thousand people play the first version of the game. A few dozen found it enjoyable enough to return to play over and over, and a few dozen more more played it a handful of times. This was encouraging, but it also provided a strong signal that something was missing from the game.

Major routes planned for new game design.

The general shape of the new game will be to “complete” the game, where completion will be defined by the goal of having “visited” particular places across the country.  A player will progress through “levels”, where each level will have a smaller goal of travel-based achievement. Traveling will still be done by solving the word puzzles, but there will be more emphasis on acquiring a collection of places visited to meet the goals. For example, when you have visited your 10th National Park, you will move to the next level.

We are pretty excited about how much this will improve the game.  Providing a good "travel" experience means we have more work to do than just writing the software. We'll need more data about routes and locations across the country.  We'll be working on curating this data and writing the software in parallel to help speed things up, but we still expect it to take a few months.  Our game continues to be available to play in its first version in case you are interested in seeing the basic premise of the game.

Plates Across America Demo Game

 

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

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.