Souvenirs vs Geocaching: which one fits you?

Geocaching is a twenty-plus-year-old worldwide game of hidden containers. Somebody hid a box, published its coordinates, and you go and find it, sign the paper logbook inside, put it back exactly as it was, and log the find in the app. Groundspeak has run it since long before app stores existed.

Nothing else in this comparison is close on scale. The US App Store shows 4.8 out of 5 from 66K ratings and Google Play 4.6 from 155K reviews, on 10M+ Play installs, with millions of physical caches worldwide. Wherever you are reading this, there is almost certainly one within walking distance.

Souvenirs puts a digital souvenir at a real named place, a landmark, a museum, a corner somebody thought worth the walk. Claiming one usually requires being near the actual location, and each claim earns XP that levels you up. There is nothing physical to find, nothing to sign and nothing to put back.

Collecting is free with a limited number of free claims. The Collectors Club, which lifts that limit, is $8.99 monthly, $69.99 yearly or $99.99 for life on the US App Store.

Both apps are free to download and both sell a membership, but the free versions are not equivalent. Geocaching's free tier lets you play, but most caches are gated behind Premium, which the US App Store lists at $5.99 and $6.99 monthly and $29.99 and $39.99 annually; geocaching.com's own payments page shows one year for $39.99 or $6.99 a month. Offline maps and saving cache details for a trip without signal are Premium features too.

Souvenirs' free tier is a number of claims rather than a subset of the map: what is free is limited in quantity, not in which places you can see. Whether that is the better deal depends entirely on how much you intend to play. If you find two caches a year, Geocaching free is enough forever.

This is where it gets interesting, and not in our favour as much as you might expect. Geocaching's app uses your live location to navigate you to a cache, but nothing in its listing states that a Found It log is GPS enforced, and finds are user-submitted, so the table says not stated.

That undersells it, though. Geocaching's proof is the logbook: you cannot sign a piece of paper inside a box from your sofa. It is an offline, physical check that no app-side verification can match. Souvenirs' check is the other kind: claiming usually requires being near the actual location, which is enforced by the app and needs nobody to maintain a container in the rain.

Geocaching asks for patience. Coordinates get you close and then you are searching, sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes for nothing because the cache is gone. That searching is the entire hobby for the people who love it, and it is also exactly why some people quit in the first afternoon.

Souvenirs asks for the walk and not the search. You arrive, you claim, you carry on. That is thinner as a game and better as a reason to take a different route home. If you want the puzzle, we are not it.