Conquercise - A Fetcheveryone Game Guide

The world has been divided into mile-wide zones. How many can you explore and capture?

If you're looking for an incentive to explore new routes, or just a way to make your training a bit more fun, this is it. Conquercise is a free GPS game for Fetchies. Broaden your horizons whilst simultaneously peering through your curtains with suspicion at any runner that goes past!

Give me the short version...

The world has been carved up into 324 million zones, and your first goal is to explore as many zones as you can. Each visit to a zone earns points, and the person with most points can rename the zone to annoy their friends. Boom.

Get Started

Visit Conquercise and hit the big join the game button. The game tries to set you up with a home zone to centre your map. If you've already told the site where you are, it should do this step automatically. If not, enter a placename or postcode in the 'Go to...' box, and the map will zoom in. Click the zone that suits you best, and then click 'Set this as your home zone'. You can always choose a different zone later, once you've got the hang of things.

Goal 1: Explore

Every time you log a run, ride, swim or walk, the game will track the zones you visit. You'll get a notification for each new zone you reach. This obviously relies on your training coming from a GPS device (click here to connect your Garmin, Suunto, Fitbit, Polar or TomTom).

Any GPS point inside the zone is enough to trigger a visit. As you gain experience, you'll get used to plotting routes with little detours to dip into unconquered zones. Trips to see the family, holidays, commuting - all ideal opportunities to increase your score! Also look out for your lawn - the number of explored zones that are connected to your home zone. Grow it by bridging the gaps for zones you've explored that aren't connected to your main chunk!

Goal 2: Ownership

When you visit a zone, you score daily points (run=2, bike=1, walk=1, swim=4). These points last for 12 months - and the person with the most points becomes the zone owner. Click any zone on the map to see who owns it. If you're in a popular zone, ownership is quite an achievement! As well as the prestige, ownership lets you rename the zone. Here's what my home zone looks like today:

The Game Map

When you've been playing for a while, the game map will look something like the image below. The green zones are ones that you own. Yellow and orange show zones you've visited within the last 12 months, whilst grey zones are older. The orange ones are special, because they are ripe for invasion! Click any zone to see who your competitors are. The red numbers show your lead or deficit, and a cake symbol means ownership is tied!

Naming zones...

It's fun to wind up local players by stealing and renaming their zones. Admittedly, some zones are just descriptive (like the dreamy Elm Farm Industrial Estate) - but it's great to see some more imaginative ones in the mix, and if you take control, you get to choose! Here are some of the more intriguing ones I've found over the last couple of days:

• Harlow is it me you're looking for?
• I reckon you could live on the M69 Roundabout and nobody would know
• Brechin Castle Centre - home to garden gizzits and all-year stockist of Xmas Tat
• You live in Clapham? How .... interesting.
• There's a horse here sometimes

Give it a go...

To play the game, visit the Conquercise Page and join up. Perhaps the best bit about the game is that it can be low maintenance. You can just log your runs, rides etc, and see where it takes you. But there are site badges to collect for various achievements in the game - and it can get very addictive! The leading players have explored over 10,000 zones.

And finally...

Like every other tool on the site, this feature has evolved from your feedback. If it doesn't quite give you what you need, I want to know! If you think something is broken, you can report a bug. Or if you think there's room for improvement, with a new table or graph - why not submit a feature request?

About Fetcheveryone
Fetcheveryone is a small independent company. There's no big corporation behind it, just me, with a dog on my feet in a home office at the bottom of the garden. Despite that, the site generates nearly 25 million page views per year and plays host to over 300,000 visitors every year. We also offer extensive training logging and analysis; and a thriving supportive community of lovely people. Unlike some sites, we have no paywall. As someone who loves running, my goal is to add value, not extract it. Three quarters of our funding comes from voluntary donations from happy users.