Postcards
Cards you can only make there.
Viewpoints, peaks, waterfalls, caves, hot springs, beaches, lighthouses. A pin on the map, and you have to go. Stand there, photograph it, and the photograph is the card.
How it works
Go. Look. Send.
- A place appears on the map. The same pin for every place, never a photograph — the reveal is the reward, and putting it on the map would spend it before anyone travelled.
- Reach it and claim it. A deliberate tap once you are there. That records the visit and nothing else.
- Make a card. While you are standing there, take a photograph. That picture, on warm paper with a scalloped edge, a stamp, the place name and the date, is the postcard. Make as many as you like — but each one needs its own new photograph, taken there.
- Send it. One card to one person, later, from anywhere. To a friend it lands at once. To anyone else it waits for them to accept, and a decline hands it back to you — it cost a trip to make.
The rules
The trip is the cost.
A postcard has exactly one source: somebody stood at the place and took a picture. Postcards are never in crates, never sold, and never traded — a card that can be passed on has no provenance, and sent by would stop meaning anything.
Two people who live beside a waterfall can make as many cards of it as they like. Somebody who flew to Antarctica made theirs the hard way. Both are receipts for a journey, which is the whole point.
- Distance is checked by the server. Against the place's own coordinates, so a card cannot be made from the sofa.
- One photograph, one card. A picture can never back two cards, and a photo cannot be attached after the fact or swapped later.
- No message field. The card carries the place name and the date, both facts the server already holds. Nothing on it can be used to say anything to anybody.
- Visited beats received. Get sent Uluru, then stand there yourself, and the entry upgrades to your own card. It never goes the other way.
- Antarctica stays. Places almost nobody can reach are in the set on purpose.