Damian Kula

The concept

In general, the concept is very simple. The world is divided into an equal grid. I think the grid itself doesn't have anything to do with any map projection or geographical grid. From what I've read, it's just some arbitrary size of OSM map tile at some arbitrary zoom level. XD In result of that, each square has a side roughly a mile long.

And now, what do we do with the grid? We just visit those tiles. You take your gps-recording device and with the strength of your muscles go to record a sport activity of any sort in those tiles. Simple!

I think the concept was first invented by Veloviewer and is called "Veloviewer Explorer Tiles". I never met anyone who would use veloviewer for tracking those and also I've never heard anyone calling them with that official name. We all just call them "Squares".

How to track squares?

You can track and monitor which squares you visited by pushing your GPS track to Strava and then using some external service to crunch their data and visualize it on the map. The most user friendly service I found is statshunters.com. There are few other services, aforementioned veloviewer.com as well as squadrats.com. The latter introduces some stronger gamification as the product and they have a more polished app, which is also a paid product. What is more interesting, they introduced smaller squares, "squadrathinos", which give you more opportunities to visit places. But since I pay already for too many subscriptions, I didn't care enough to pay them for that.

My service of choice is statshunters.com. It's developed by a single dev, Stan, who is doing an amazing job maintaining that whole thing. The app pulls your data from Strava every time you visit the app, in order to calculate your statistics, draw visited gps tracks, check whether you collected some new badges. Stan also develops browser addon that allows you to draw your next route to collect missing squares by overlaying a grid over the map in the mapping tool of your choice. Of course, his time, effort and infra is not free so I would encourage you to follow my steps and send him some donation from time to time.

The Goal

In reality, there is no goal. It's game against yourself, where you are just encouraged to explore places that you didn't visit so far with some nice tools to visualize that. But if you need a goal, it can be based on three basic concepts of the Squares. Once again, there are not really any rules attached to this game. Just do any sort of activity in the open air, record the track with gps and voila. Any sport, any device that is allowing you to propel yourself forward through work of your muscles.

Nobody will stop you from collecting squares by car but hey, that's your own dignity and you can do anything with it.

But why?

Why not? It's fun. It's motivating me to move my ass and to go to places for no other reason than just to collect that one square.

I lived in Strasbourg for 3 years before discovering Statshunters. I had visited only a max square of 3x3, missing all the weird parts of the city.

I lived in Biberach for 5 years, I visited square of 30x30. Most of those places would be nowhere interesting enough to make sense of visiting them if not squares. I would love to continue growing that square but now I live in different place and I have a new square to grow.

Did it make me a better cyclist? I don't think so, no. It just gave me a good reason to get out and ride a bit. And that's something I would recommend you too. Just get out from home and move yourself, whatever the sport and transport mode you choose. Just go and collect those squares.