[Kickstarter] Dust Your Friends in a Game of Geo-Combat with Dustcloud

Walking around CES, I got to see the “next greatest things in tech” scattered throughout thousands of booths in the three convention halls. It’s not always inside that you’ll see the latest ideas, though. I happened to be outside for a breather of the North Hall when I bumped into Howard Hunt, founder and CEO of The Dustcloud. Howard demonstrated this new GPS-based game of laser tag to me first-hand.

The small, hand-held guns are called Dusters and shoot invisible bullets called Speks. When someone says laser tag, everyone immediately knows what that means, but calling this laser tag is a little misleading. The Dusters aren’t actually lasers, but are ZigBee powered, meaning they can’t be blocked by clothing or people and have a range of five meters. There’s blue, green, and red teams where you try to take out or dust your opponents by blasting them with Speks. (Note that you can change colors at any time.) Each Duster is paired to your Android or iOS device via Bluetooth and broadcasts your location and stats to The Dustcloud. You can track opponents, create alliances, see your friends, call on opponents for a match, and call in backup to “avenge your death” where you were just dusted. As you dust more opponents you move up the ranks and your Duster becomes more powerful. If The Dustcloud takes off, there’s aspiration for expansion into things such as Google Glass, the possibilities are endless. 

Using Speks costs cash money at $.05 each via PayPal, so there’s an incentive to use them wisely. They’re stored in your paired device where you can reload them into your Duster. But, if you’re a good player you won’t have to buy them very often. When someone is dusted:

• Their Dusters are switched off for thirteen seconds.
• The Speks in their Dusters are captured by the player who has dusted them.
• Their positional marker (POI) disappears from the iOS and Android app on their phone.
• Their efficiency percentage decreases incrementally on the Dustcloud database.
• Their Mini Dossier is sent to the Dustbin in the Dossier of the player who has dusted them.

If you don’t want to pay for Speks and just want to play for fun without stats, there’s an option for offline mode. You’ll get five lives to Dust your opponents. When you are dusted your Duster refills in thirteen seconds, but in the meantime your opponent receives one of your Speks.

The Dustcloud has a Kickstarter campaign going, which is trying to get it off the ground. Early backers will get incentives such a free magazine of six Speks every 24 hours though 2015. If you want an early Duster, you’ll have to pledge at least $39, but that’ll get you 300 Speks, two 24 hour empty Spek recharges through 2015, and three minute resurrection.

The Dustcloud looks like a fun strategy-filled game to play with friends and strangers alike; it couples the essence of laser tag with modern technology in Geo-Combat utilizing GPS, social networking, and mobile devices.

Check out Dustcloud’s Kickstarter Campaign HERE.