Gamifying a Town Festival: 2,182 Finds Over Two Nights

Everything else we had published came from conferences, trade fairs and campuses. Those share a shape: a registered audience, a defined venue, daytime hours, and a reason to be there that has nothing to do with the game.

A town festival is none of that. People arrive when they feel like it, wander with family, and the good part of the night starts after dinner. We ran Treasure Hunt at Festival do Cadaval on 22 and 23 May 2026 to find out what that changes.

The numbers

• 126 players across two evenings
• 2,182 treasures found from 57 checkpoints, 38.3 per checkpoint
• 98.4% of players claimed a reward, our highest rate to date
• 421 merch purchases from an 18-item store
• 76,775 FCT tokens distributed on-chain
• 2,618 transactions, every fee sponsored, so playing cost nothing
• 20 of 126 players came back on the second night

The festival runs at night

The hour-by-hour data is the clearest difference. The first scan of the first night landed at 5 PM and then almost nothing moved for three hours. At 8 PM the hour recorded 120 scans, at 9 PM it hit 227, and the game kept running past 11. The second day started slowly in the early afternoon, built through the evening, and peaked at 7 PM with 336 scans, the busiest hour of the whole festival.

Compare that with the Data with Purpose Summit, where the peak was 10 AM and the game was effectively over by 5 PM. Same product, opposite curve. A festival hunt that launches at noon is launching into an empty field.

The practical consequence: staff the game for the evening, put the leaderboard somewhere visible after dark, and do not judge the deployment by what the dashboard looks like at 4 PM.

Engagement went deeper than at conferences

Players averaged 17.3 finds each, against 4.8 at ETHDenver and 9.8 at Future Maker. The distribution was unusually healthy too: 25 players landed in the 20 to 40 finds band, 22 in the 40 to 70 band, and only 5 players finished under 10 finds.

The reason is probably time rather than motivation. A conference attendee plays between sessions. A festival visitor is there for the evening with nothing scheduled, and the hunt becomes the thing they are doing rather than the thing they are doing between other things.

The reward claim rate says the same. 98.4% of players claimed at least one reward, the highest we have recorded. Eight of the 18 items in the store sold out, including all 57 festival badges and all 46 festival wristbands.

Players hid their own treasures

Cadaval is the event where the player-hiding mechanic actually took off. Players hid checkpoints of their own for other people to find. The single most-found player-hidden tag was found 56 times, more than half the player base, and the top three player hiders accounted for 143 finds between them.

The hider leaderboard runs to 18 names. This does not happen at a conference. It needs an audience that is relaxed, in a place they know, with people they came with. Where it does happen it solves a real problem for free: the organizer stops being the only source of new content on night two.

Sponsors and the municipality

Sponsored items were among the best sellers. The Crédito Agrícola cup moved 60 units and the branded lanyard 53, and municipal pens and pencils moved 72 between them. For a sponsor, this is a cheaper way to place branded objects in people's hands than a giveaway table, because the visitor has to earn the item and therefore wants it.

What we would tell a festival organizer

Weight the checkpoints toward the food stalls, the stages and the routes between them, because that is where the crowd already is. Start the game in the late afternoon and expect the real numbers after 7 PM. Let visitors hide their own treasures from the first night. Keep the reward store stocked with things people would actually carry home, and accept that the good items will sell out on night two.

The full report, with the per-tag table, the hourly grid and the merch sell-through curves, is public: see the Festival do Cadaval 2026 report. For the general format, see NFC treasure hunts, and the Portuguese-language page on caça ao tesouro digital.