Some of you may well know that my friend Jo and I built the PackRat Tools website (a companion for Alamofire's other game, PackRat). Well, today (7th December) is her birthday so to celebrate I decided to merge Gowalla and PackRat together! How you ask? Simple - by using the bookmark below, you will be able to flip the stamps on the Gowalla homepage in the same way you'd flip PackRat cards to earn Guineas (Gowalla Tools very own currency). The more stamps you flip, the more Guineas you are likely to earn! These Guineas are then tied to your Gowalla account so I can keep track of how many you have earned. I ran a competition during our "13 days of Gowalla Tools Christmas" in which the 13 players with the most Guinea's earned won a place on our iPhone App beta testing crew.
To see how it all works, check out this little video I made:
So, all you need to do is drag the link below (or right click and "add as a favourite" if using IE8) to your bookmarks bar. Then, go to gowalla.com/spots, and click the bookmark you just saved. You'll be asked to enter your Gowalla username (although you can enter somebody else's if you want to collect coins for them) and then you'll get a nice new Gowalla Tools toolbar at the foot of the page. You are now activated and able to start flipping the stamps on that page. Click one to flip it and you'll find either a puff of smoke or a treasured Guinea hidden behind. If you found Guinea's, click on them to have them added to your total (the status bar at the bottom will keep a running total for you). Once you've flipped all of the stamps on a page, click your bookmarklet again to make them active once more. You can then resume clicking, and clicking, and clicking, and clicking, and oh look it's 3am!
There's absolutely nothing to be gained by playing anymore but you might find it fun - give it a try!
This bookmarklet has been tested in Safari 4, Chrome, Firefox 3.5, and IE8. Please contact me if you run into any problems.