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.