The 10 best location-based games

Pikmin Bloom is from the same studio that brought you Pokémon Go. It doesn’t have the same player base as the ultra-popular game, but Pikmin fans will find a lot to get excited about with the latest augmented reality (AR) experience. The relaxing game has you walking around your neighborhood to grow your squad of Pikmin. The quirky creatures hatch out of seedlings you’ll acquire as you play, and after a few weeks, you’ll have a whole army following you around wherever you go. It’s not as deep as some other GPS-based games, but the casual adventure is a great way to get outside and relax.

One of the few high-profile AR games not developed by Niantic, The Witcher: Monster Slayer is a mature take on the genre. You’ll still be roaming around town with your phone in front of you, but this time, you’ll be fighting deadly creatures and going on a variety of quests. You’ll be tracking monsters using Witcher Senses, kitting yourself out with a wide assortment of gear, then swiping your fingers on the screen to perform a variety of actions during combat. The narrative driving the action isn’t quite as deep as the main Witcher games — but it still draws from the same lore and offers hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Unlike other games on this list, geocaching isn’t a discrete product from a particular developer, but rather a huge, community-driven activity. In many ways, it’s the ancestor of all of these other location-based games, since it started in 2000 when the GPS standard was first opened to the wider public. Participants hide GPS-enabled containers all over the world and then other people use the coordinates to find them and see what they contain. At a minimum, they contain a logbook that players sign, but some contain more exciting secrets. Community standards dictate that if players find something in a cache, they replace it with something of equal or greater value. We’ve included the link to two free geocaching apps below, but there are more feature-rich, premium options available as well. While it may not have the elaborate metagame of something like Ingress, geocaching has a vibrant, global community that’s far more established than any other game on our list.