Stamps¶
A stamp is a place — celebrated. Visit a landmark, a city, a region, a country deeply enough that it earns its mark on your Passport. Each stamp comes with curated artwork, a story, and a guide — a small travel guide of the places worth visiting that earned it.
The story¶
Travel apps treat places as logistics — addresses, ratings, hours. We wanted stamps to treat them as memory anchors: this is where I was, this is what it meant. The stamp itself is the artifact — bespoke artwork, a story about why the place matters, the trace of when you were there.
Stamps are exclusively geographic. That's the discipline. They aren't about activity ("post 10 things") or social ("make 5 friends") — those belong to challenges. A stamp says one thing: you were here, and we think this place is worth remembering.
The guide¶
Every stamp carries a guide — a curated list of entries the user can visit to earn the stamp. What an entry is depends on the stamp's scope:
- Landmark stamps: one specific place (Pike Place Market, Itsukushima Shrine, Times Square). Earned by visiting that landmark.
- District / City stamps: a curated set of landmarks within the district or city. "Visit 5 of these 12 temples in Kyoto" — variety within a place.
- Region stamps: a mix of cities and broader regions. Visit Florence (city entry) or any place in Tuscany (region entry) — both count.
- Country stamps: a mix of regions and cities. France's stamp might list Île-de-France, Provence, and Lyon — any visit within those areas counts.
- Multi-country stamps (Mediterranean, East Asia, Eastern Europe): a list of countries; one visit per country earns the entry.
The default is "visit all," but admin can set a minimum — "X of Y" for the wide / discovery stamps. Visiting all 12 Kyoto temples is the completionist path; visiting 5 of them still earns the stamp.
Each guide entry has a photo, a name, a short description, and optional recommendations (what to do there, what to look for). Pre-earn, the guide is content — a discovery surface in its own right, helping the user know where to look. Post-earn, it shows what they visited and what they missed.
What you don't earn stamps for¶
- Posting moments at a place (that's a moment — see Moments)
- Liking, saving, or "wanting to visit" — wishful thinking doesn't count
- Brief drive-through — Tomoda's location matching requires actual presence
The bar is real. You went there. That's how you earn it.
The Passport¶
Earned stamps live in the Passport — the user's place-anchored collection. Stamps + travel history (cities, regions, countries visited) live together as one geographic record. Curios (the activity-anchored artifacts you earn from completing challenges) live separately in the Collection.
Two sides of the same map: the Passport answers "where have you been?" The Collection answers "what have you done?"