SIDEQUEST 🇿🇦

Life is the main quest. Go find the side quests.

A real-world adventure game that turns the whole country into your playground. Grab your friends, pick a quest, and go — a lunch break, a long weekend, or a road trip to nowhere.

How It Works

1. Pick your base. Set your home from a 19-city picker or hit Use my location — no sign-up required to play.
2. Pick a quest. Browse the map, search any place in the country, or scroll the Instagram-style feed filtered by category, budget, distance or date.
3. Actually go. Quests are GPS-gated — you can only complete one when your device is near the place. No completing quests from the couch.
4. Get rewarded. XP, levels, ranks (Rookie → Explorer → Trailblazer → Legend of SA), badges, streaks and stats — alone or with a squad (+20% XP).
5. Stay for the events. New ticketed events keep appearing on their own, so there's always something happening this weekend.

Features

🗺️ Explore the Map

The whole country as a dark game board with every quest pinned in its real location. Search finds any place or quest — local results first, then live OpenStreetMap for anything else — and flies you straight to it. The map never goes blank — if the map service hiccups, it quietly switches to a backup source. Auto-discovered events stand out with pulsing red LIVE pins and their own filter chip.

📍 Location-first gameplay

Quests are GPS-gated: you can only complete one when your device is within 5 km of every stop. Every quest shows a live drive time and one-tap directions in Google Maps or Waze.

📜 The Quest Feed

Scroll like it's Instagram — real places plus quests the whole community made up. Pull down to refresh (which also reshuffles and fetches the freshest events), and filter with one tap:

• Category — Free, Chill, Food, Activity, Adventure, Event, Mystery
• Vibe — chill, funny, social, competitive, romantic, chaotic, outdoors…
• Anywhere — quests with no location, doable right now
• Community — quests created by players, platform-wide
• Seasonal — limited-time quests with live "Ends Sunday" countdowns
• 🟥 Live — ticketed sport, concerts & comedy from the nightly feed, with a 📅 When sub-filter: This weekend (Fri 5pm–Sun) or This month
• 🎪 Festival / 🛍️ Market / 🏎️ Automotive — real calendar events
• 💰 Budget slider — filter by price per person, with an adaptive range that matches the priciest quest on offer
• 📍 Feed location + radius — browse quests near a different city, with nearest-first sorting and ≤25 km / ≤100 km radius filters
• 🔥 Trending — the most-reviewed quests first

Only upcoming events are ever shown — dated events more than ~6 months out are hidden everywhere, so the feed never reads like a year-ahead schedule.

🏆 Progress & Glory

XP, levels and ranks — Rookie → Explorer → Trailblazer → Legend of SA. Daily streaks, a stats dashboard (km covered, quests per category, favourite province, total hours) and 46 badges — from Night Owl and Rain Warrior to the 10km Club, Golden Hour and South Africa Explorer. Tap any badge for its details and live progress toward the next one.

✍️ Creator Titles

Community quest authors earn vanity titles instead of money — Quest Writer → Quest Curator → Quest Master → Quest Legend — shown as a gold chip next to their name in the feed and tracked on the profile. Community quests are moderated: blocklist-checked, reportable, and auto-hidden after enough reports.

👥 Friends, Squads & Co-op

Add your crew by username and watch real stats sync live. Squads bring a co-op layer: create a squad, invite friends, see the roster update in real time, and every member earns a +20% XP bonus on quests completed together. The Activity feed surfaces friends' quest completions and badge milestones as they happen.

🔧 Chain Builder

Assemble your own multi-stop quest from the whole catalog, reorder the stops, and share it as a link that carries the entire quest inside the URL.

⭐ Ratings & Reviews (real, moderated)

After completing a quest you can rate it 1–5 stars and leave a tip — only players who actually finished the quest can review it. Reviews are blocklist-checked, anyone can report one, and a review auto-hides after enough reports.

⏳ Seasonal Quests

Limited-time quests tied to real SA events — Braai Day, the Soweto Food Festival, Rocking the Daisies, December holidays, Comrades, Splashy Fen, the National Arts Festival — with a live countdown in the feed and automatic removal once the event passes.

🎟️ Live Events — automatically discovered

SideQuest finds new events by itself, every night: real, dated, ticketed events are pulled from free public sources, placed on real map coordinates, and merged into the map and feed with ticket links, prices and countdowns — so there's always something happening this weekend.

• Tickets built in — every ticketed event lists exactly where to buy: Ticketmaster, Webtickets, Computicket, Ticketpro, Quicket, Howler, iTickets, Big Concerts and the festivals' own sites — with a countdown ("⏳ 2 days left to get tickets", red when ≤ 3 days) so you don't miss out.
• Works offline — the event feed is cached, so recent events stay available without a connection.
• Never stale — past and far-future events are dropped automatically, and only events that can be placed accurately are ever shown.