Ingress, the popular real world adventure game, is celebrating its second birthday this year and is doing so by kicking off a brand new monthly series called ‘First Saturdays’. This new event serves to bring new Ingress ‘agents’ (players) into the fold and events will run simultaneously around the world in 120 different cities, run by players themselves. The first of these monthly events will kick off on the 1st of November, 2014, and will run for a schedule time of two weeks. During this period of time, agents in the game will earn double AP points, triple rewards for portal hacks, and exclusive medals for reaching a certain level within the time frame, which ends on the 15th November, 2014.
For those of you that are unfamiliar with Ingress, don’t feel too bad. It’s a relatively new game, in terms of both its lifetime and the way it works. The game, which was released in 2012, combines traditional aspects of gaming with real-world exploration. Ingress is developed by Ninatic Labs, a startup within Google itself, and was released initially on Android before reaching iOS earlier this year on the 14th July.
The game essentially consists of establishing portals at different places in the real world, such as places of public art, landmarks, etc, and linking these portals to create virtual triangular fields over locations. You build points in mind units, which is the number of ‘mind units’ (people) controlled by each faction, which is shown on the Intel Map. The links that are needed to be made between location and location vary from meters, to kilometres, to hundreds of kilometres, with some even stretching across the world as Ingress has managed to attract an avid fanbase in the two years that it’s been running, both young and old, to the point where for some the game is no longer a game but a lifestyle that they live. If that sounds interesting to you, then head over to the Google Play Store to download the app. Now seems to be the best time for any newcomers for the game, seeing as how the first monthly event will allow you to level up quicker.