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Game Rules

Tomoda's game layer is the system that turns your real-world activity into collectible memory. You go places, you meet people, you do things — the engine listens, recognizes patterns, and rewards them with curios, stamps, and the satisfaction of seeing a small constellation form on your profile.

The story

We didn't want gamification in the cheap sense — points, leaderboards, streaks-as-treadmill. We wanted the quiet version of gamification: a system that pays attention to what you're already doing, finds the patterns worth celebrating, and gives them shape.

The mental model is earn-by-doing, not earn-by-grinding. You don't "play" Tomoda to score points. You live your life with the app open, and the engine quietly tracks the geography, the people, the recurrence, the firsts — and when something genuinely interesting happens, it tells you. "You've now been to seven cafés in three different countries." "Three of your friends joined this circle." "You and Mei have crossed paths in four cities."

Three things make this work:

  1. The engine has many ears, but they all listen to the same thing. Posting a moment, minting a stamp, checking in, attending an event — every visit-producing action writes one row into the travel log, and the engine listens to that one channel. New activity types add without rewiring the rules.

  2. Rules are composable. A rule can be as simple as "visit 10 cafés" or as rich as "do this AND that AND not before completing the other," built from a small vocabulary of leaves and operators. Authors compose instead of asking us to ship a new code path for every idea.

  3. You opt in to things that are time-bound, and you don't opt in to things that just happen. A daily challenge is a quest — you choose it. An achievement like "visit your hundredth country" just happens in the background and surfaces as a delightful surprise. The system knows the difference.

What you encounter

  • Challenges — the engagement units. Some are always-on slow burns ("collect 100 countries"). Some are quests you opt into (today's daily, this week's weekly, a special event). Some are parents that group children — opt into the parent, the children come along.
  • Curios — the rewards. Story-bearing artwork that lands in your Tomoda Collection when a backing challenge completes. Curios are pure content — they have no rules of their own. They earn their place by riding on a challenge.
  • Stamps — the place-anchored version. Curated stamps celebrate specific cities, regions, countries. They aren't rule-driven; they light up when you genuinely visit (see Stamps).
  • The Tomoda Collection — the home for both. Curios + earned stamps. Your archaeology of where you've been and what you've done.

What it isn't

  • No leaderboards. We never compare your collection to anyone else's. Friends can see what you've earned (with your visibility settings respected), but there's no "rank."
  • No streaks-as-pressure. A daily challenge you didn't engage with doesn't haunt you — it expires quietly and the only loss is what you didn't pick up. We don't punish absence.
  • No grinding. Rules favor variety over volume. You won't unlock the best things by visiting the same place a thousand times; you'll unlock them by visiting a hundred different ones.

The promise

What you do in the real world becomes something. Not a number, not a score — a thing you can hold (a curio with a story) or look back at (a stamp from a specific place). The engine's job is to notice, and to make noticing feel earned.