Hello Hacker News,

A friend and I recently finished building Stridewars, which is step competition with the addition of power-ups.

Power-ups can increase your steps and reduce your opponent's steps, adding a bit of fun and strategy to a standard step competition.

Power-ups are earned by syncing your steps each day in the Stridewars app and hitting a daily 7,000-step target. The further your team falls behind the leaders, the higher your chances of drawing stronger/rarer power-ups.

Example Power-ups: - Duvet Day (Rare) – play 10,000 steps for the day - Roller Skates (Epic) – increase your step count by 50% for the day - Shield (Rare) – protect your team from being targeted - Thief (Rare) – steal an uncommon power-up from another team - Sludge (Common) – reduce another team’s steps by 4%

A full list of power-ups can be viewed here:

https://www.stridewars.com/dashboard/powerups

There’s no power-up equivalent of a Blue Shell. We thought that might be a bit too much.

We originally tried using the Fitbit app to sync steps, but the setup was clunky and the data wasn't always accurate. So we reluctantly built the Stridewars app. It reads steps directly from your phone (via Health Connect or Apple Health), includes a simple team chat, and links to a web dashboard showing the leaderboard, recent news feed, and your available power-ups.

We’re running a one-week competition starting Monday 12th January (local time), open to anyone. If you would like to participate, please register by Saturday 10th January and complete a quick test sync from the Stridewars app. It's free to play.

Here is the link to join the competition:

https://www.stridewars.com/join-competition?competitionId=2fec3e01-8921-433c-b99e-2a27acd4020a

It does require a quick registration but you can use a fake name and email if you prefer. Please use an address ending in @deleteme.com so the system doesn’t try to send an email. After registering, download the Stridewars app and complete one test sync so you’re ready when the competition starts.

We only use your email address for sending communications like reminders and joining information. Your email will be deleted shortly after the competition too.

It's 5 people per team and you will be randomly assigned to a team. If you want to be on the same team as a friend, send me the email addresses you both used and I’ll place you together. If team sizes are uneven, we have a few “bot walkers” that sync steps daily and donate their power-ups to teammates.

Privacy All data is deleted within six weeks of the competition ending, including your account. The only data we collect from the Stridewars app is your daily step count. We don’t send any data to third parties.

It's all a bit of fun while being a bit more active than you normally would.

Happy to answer questions.