The Game Manager’s Manual

How a Race Fits Together

Every GeoRacer race has the same three people in it, even when it’s just you testing solo: a manager running the dashboard from a laptop, a runner out in the field with a phone, and a home base teammate parked in front of a browser. The runner and home base see different things on purpose — the whole game is built around them having to talk to each other.

The rest of this manual walks through that build order: checkpoint sets and question sets first (§2–3, since a game can’t exist without at least a checkpoint set), then the game wizard itself (§4–6), then what you do with teams once they’ve joined (§7), what the dashboard shows you mid-race (§8), how the numbers on the leaderboard are actually computed (§9), and how a race ends (§10).

Checkpoint Sets

A checkpoint set is the physical shape of a race: a home base location plus a list of geofenced points, independent of any particular game. Build one once — a park, a summer-house neighbourhood, a stag-do route — and reuse it across as many games as you like. Manage them under Checkpoint Sets in the top nav.

Placing checkpoints on the map

Open a set to get a map with your existing checkpoints as numbered pins. Add Here drops a pin at your current device location; Add Manual lets you type coordinates. Drag any pin to move it. Each checkpoint gets a name, a point value, and a capture radius in meters (how close a runner’s GPS has to get before the checkpoint counts as reachable).

Checkpoint answer types

A checkpoint’s “question” is optional — leave it blank for a pure GPS tag-and-go. Fill it in and you pick one of three answer types, which decide how a runner’s answer gets scored:

For an auto-verified checkpoint you also choose what happens on a wrong answer — Retry (default: keep guessing until correct) or Complete with 0 points (the runner can give up on this one checkpoint and move on for zero points instead of getting stuck).

Sharing a set with co-managers

Every set has a share mode, set from the Share button:

Question Sets

Question sets are a separate, optional layer: trivia solved between checkpoints rather than at them. They’re what turn a GPS scavenger hunt into something the runner and home base have to solve together — each question has two separate clues.

The runner clue (with optional image) goes to the phone in the field; the home base clue (also with optional image) goes to the browser back at base. Design a set so neither clue alone is enough — a photo of a sign only the runner can see, paired with a question about it that only home base is shown to relay back, for instance. Each question is free_text or multiple_choice.

A question set only affects a game once you attach it during game setup, where you also set how many questions get drawn per leg and how many bonus points a team earns for a perfect leg.

Creating a Game

A game is a two-step wizard: pick a checkpoint set, then configure everything else. Start it from Create New Game on the dashboard.

Step 1 — Select a checkpoint set

The only two things a game truly requires are a name and a checkpoint set — pick from your own sets or anything shared publicly. The game inherits its home base location and checkpoint list from whatever set you choose here; you can’t set home base coordinates per-game.

Step 2 — Game Settings

The top card covers the basics: name, optional description, and an overall game duration in minutes (with a separate, shorter trail duration — how long a runner’s breadcrumb trail stays visible on the map before fading).

• Home Base Checkpoint Visibility — all lets the home base teammate see the whole route at once; next_only shows just the checkpoint currently being chased, hiding the rest for a stricter need-to-know pace. Only selectable when checkpoint order is enforced.
• Allow Team Self-Signup — lets participants create their own team while joining, instead of you pre-creating every team. Whoever creates the team becomes its home base.
• Require homebase return — turns on late-return penalties, covered in §9.

Questions Between Checkpoints

Tick Enable Questions Between Checkpoints to attach a question set. Pick one of your sets, then set Questions Per Leg (how many get drawn at random each leg — a leg is the stretch between two checkpoint completions) and Bonus Points (awarded on top when a team gets every question in a leg right).

Route Settings

Enforce Checkpoint Order is the single switch that decides whether “route mode” means anything at all. Leave it off and every team can tag their assigned checkpoints in whatever order they physically reach them — there’s no “next” checkpoint to speak of. Turn it on, and you get to choose how that fixed order is handed out per team.

All checkpoints, or a subset?

By default every team visits every checkpoint in the set. Switch to Subset of checkpoints to instead give each team a smaller, independently-chosen slice — useful for a big checkpoint set you don’t want any one team to fully exhaust. You can cap it by a raw checkpoint count, by a target total distance in meters (the algorithm swaps checkpoints between teams’ routes until every team’s distance lands within your tolerance percentage), or both.

Routes regenerate automatically whenever you add or remove a team, using whatever route settings the game currently has. You can also trigger a fresh generation manually, and while a game is still in Setup you can drag-reorder any one team’s stops individually from the Teams & Routes page — that reordering locks the instant the game goes active.

Start Modes

Start mode decides whose clock starts when.

Teams & Roles

Once a game exists, add teams from the game detail page or the dedicated Teams & Routes page. Adding or removing a team automatically regenerates routes for everyone in the game, so it’s safe to keep adjusting the roster right up until start — team creation itself is blocked once the game goes active.

Joining with the game code

Every game gets a 6-character code plus a QR code you can print or project. Participants scan the QR code, or open the /join page and enter the code, then pick a role for the team they’re joining:

• runner — the person on the course with the phone.
• home_base — the coordinator on a browser, off the course.

Each role is a single exclusive slot per team. If someone tries to join a role that’s already taken, they’re told it’s occupied unless they explicitly force-join — which silently takes over the slot from whoever was in it, rather than kicking them through a separate action.

Routes per team

Expand a team on the Teams & Routes page to see its full stop-by-stop order, home base to home base. While the game hasn’t started yet, this is drag-to-reorder; once it’s running, it’s locked.

Running the Race

Once a game is active, two pages do the day-to-day work: Live View for watching the map and leaderboard, and Live Management for touching individual teams — verifying answers, messaging, and manual overrides.

Live View

A real-time map with each team’s current position, a fading movement trail, and a leaderboard sorted by final score (checkpoint points + question points − late penalty). Everything updates live — no refresh needed.

Live Management

Per team, this page shows every checkpoint’s status, lets you edit the late penalty inline, and gives you a Join Voice button to drop into that team’s voice channel directly from the dashboard.

Reviewing Open Text and Photo answers

Anything submitted to an open_text or open_photo checkpoint sits at “Pending Verification” — worth zero points — until you open it and decide. You can award any point value up to the checkpoint’s maximum (not just all-or-nothing) and leave a note, which gets sent to the team as an in-game message if you write one.

Every checkpoint also has an Uncomplete action, and a manager can toggle a checkpoint complete on a team’s behalf entirely — bypassing GPS and order checks. Use it to fix a runner’s dead-phone moment or a genuine dispute, not as a routine shortcut.

Messaging teams mid-race

Send a text message from the bottom of Live Management, targeted as broadly or narrowly as you like: all participants, all runners only, all home bases only, or one specific team (with the same runner/home-base narrowing available within that team).

Scoring & Penalties

Checkpoint points

Each checkpoint’s point value is fixed when you create it. Auto-verified checkpoints score in full the instant the answer matches; Open Text and Photo checkpoints score whatever you award during review.

Question points

1 point per correct answer, drawn from whichever question set is attached, plus the leg’s bonus points if a team answers every question in that leg correctly. Leg 1’s questions are handed out the moment the game starts (except in Open Join games); each subsequent leg’s questions are assigned right after the checkpoint that ends the previous leg is completed.

Late return penalty

Only active when Require homebase return is on. Once it is, pick a mode:

The penalty is capped so it can never push a team’s final score below zero, and you can always override a team’s penalty value by hand from Live Management — useful for a dispute or a GPS hiccup you don’t want to punish.

Ending a Game

There’s no automatic finish. Once a team’s game duration runs out, they simply can’t complete further checkpoints — but the game itself stays active until you press End Game, behind a confirmation dialog, from either Active or Paused.

Ending a game doesn’t recalculate anything — scores just stop moving because no further checkpoint completions are possible. You can still adjust a team’s late penalty or individual checkpoint points, and still review pending Open Text / Photo submissions, after the game is finished. Once finished, the Live Management link relabels to Review Answers, and the Live View becomes a static results page — final leaderboard, medal emoji for the top teams, every team’s trail shown at once instead of live tracking.