Road trips have become a common activity in our family and one of our favorite games on road trips is plate bingo (or whatever it is called in your family.) We play cooperatively and we mark off each state’s plate that we see. On our trip to Yellowstone, we completed the whole set of 50 states plus a bunch in Canada and Mexico. We even saw a plate from Brazil!
We play on paper and it works just fine, but I was interested in trying to do it electronically. I flipped through the various apps for it but didn’t love any of them so with the power of agentic engineering, I built my own that is perfectly customized to my wishes. I’m going to skip posting the link here because I’m not really set up to service the entire internet if this page somehow gets popular, but feel free to text/email/whatever me and I’ll send you the link.
The interface is probably what you would expect. You get a big list of checkboxes for the US, Canada, and Mexico and as you check them, everything is synced to a central server so that everyone can see them. You can click into a state to see an example of the plate as well as facts about it. There’s a map view with your finds colored in, and you can upload a GPX file that overlays your route on the map along with a dot showing where you are now. At the end, you can generate a PDF report of the whole game showing some stats like the percentage of the country that you found by population and by area as well as a timeline of how many states you found per hour over your trip. In the back end I’m also keeping track of your location when you found a state with an idea to eventually come up with a “how hard is it to find state X based on your location” model.
Ultimately this whole thing could just be replaced with a single checkbox that says “Did you find West Virginia yet?” and in the unlikely event that you check that box, it says you win.