What is Runway?

Runway Match Simulation

Team Purple

Team Orange

Runway is a racing game played on a board somebody drew over the real world. A board can be as small as a street, and as large as the entire world.

A board is a set of waypoints (real places) joined by roads you can traverse. Most waypoints hold a challenge: a small, specific thing you need to do, verified with a photograph. The first team to reach the finish wins.

What you need to play

Runway is played outdoors, on foot, with a phone in your hand.


People	Up to six teams. A team is a group walking together.
Per team	At least one phone. It is the phone whose position the board sees, so it is the one that has to be with the group.
On that phone	A browser with location and camera permission granted.
A board	Somebody has to have drawn one first, see below.

Clearing a Waypoint

You walk to a waypoint, verify your location, and complete the challenge by photographing your answer to unlock the next leg of your route.

Clearing a waypoint, step by step

Your teamCleared

1. Walk there
2. GPS confirms
3. Read the prompt
4. Photograph it
5. Move on

A challenge is a small, specific task that can be settled by a single photograph. These are written by whoever drew the board. For example:

Eat something grape flavored: Packaging must specify grape.

A challenge you do not want to clear (e.g., it’s too slow, too silly or too difficult) can be vetoed. You decline it, the road opens for you anyway, and you move on immediately. A veto always works, and it always costs you something; what it costs depends on the game mode.

The finish waypoint is the only exception: it carries no challenge and pays no reward. Arriving is the only objective.

Charting a path

From the waypoint you are standing on, the only places you can go next are the waypoints directly connected to it. A waypoint fifty metres away is out of reach if no road connects you to it.

Creating a route

Where you may stepNo road, no move

Other than that, the route is entirely yours. Teams always start together but they can take different roads to the same finish.

Coins

The first team to clear a challenge earns its coin reward. Teams arriving later do not have to do the challenge again, and earn no coins.

Power-ups

Using coins collected by clearing challenges, you can buy power-ups that help your own team or slow down other teams.

Power-up	What it does
`nerf`	A target team cannot move or start a challenge for a while
`tracker_off`	Your position is withheld from the other teams for a while
`challenge_skip`	Bypasses a waypoint’s challenge with no veto penalty

Every price and duration comes from the game’s own ruleset, fixed when the game is created.

The two ways past a challenge

There are two ways past a challenge.

Passing challenges

PurpleOrange

Purple completes it

Orange vetoes it

How	Opens the road for
You complete the challenge	The whole field. Only the coin reward distinguishes first from the rest.
You veto, or use a `challenge_skip` power-up	Your team alone. A bypass is personal.

So clearing a hard waypoint is partly a gift to your rivals, and vetoing it is partly a decision to keep them working while you walk on.

The three game modes

Team race: Several teams play a single board. The winner is the team that gets to the finish first. Coins are used to buy power-ups.
Solo time trial: A single runner plays a single board. The clock is wall time from start to finish plus veto penalties.
Solo casual: The same walk, just for fun. Nothing is recorded and vetoes are free.

The price of a veto changes between modes, because a cooldown only means something when rivals are racing the same board:

Mode	Cost of a veto
Team race	A cooldown. You keep walking, but you cannot take on any challenge until it lapses.
Solo time trial	Time added to your recorded clock.
Solo casual	Nothing.

How challenge evidence gets graded

Every game fixes one of three grading modes.

Mode	What happens to your photo
trust	Honour mode. The evidence always passes, but is visible to everyone at the end of the game for disputes.
host	Evidence is held pending until the game host approves or rejects it.
llm	Evidence is graded against the challenge’s rubric by a multimodal LLM.

A GPS checking gate runs in all three modes. Teams must be standing at the waypoint before evidence can be submitted.

The game defaults to trust, because it is the only mode that asks nothing of anyone outside the game.

Where boards come from

A board consists of waypoints placed over real places, the roads drawn between them, and the challenges written onto them.

Boards are obtained one of two ways: draw your own in the board editor at /design, or fork a board somebody published from the gallery and race that. Either way, Design a board covers the editor.

Design a boardDraw waypoints over real places, join them up, write the challenges, and publish the result.