Unlock any area: a small adventure five minutes from your door

1. Open CuriFox and tap a point on the map in the area you want to explore: where you live, your parents' village, the small town where you are on holiday.

2. If the app finds no stops there yet, it offers to unlock the area. One area has a radius of about 1.5 km and costs 5 gems.

3. The app searches open data for interesting places in that area, writes a short story and a question for each one and checks that you can walk there. This runs in the background and can take up to a few hours. You get a notification when it is done.

4. After that you build routes there like in any other city: tap a start and a destination, choose the length, walk.

When you unlock an area you can switch on "Also for children". The app then keeps playgrounds as stops and writes the stories so that children understand them. The way to the bakery becomes a small scavenger hunt, and the birthday party happens where the children live, not in the city centre. An adult reads the stories and keeps an eye on the phone and the road.

In the "Daily" section you choose the days and the time at which you want a route, for example every morning at 7 or only at the weekend. At that time a new route through your area is waiting in the app, a different one every day with different stops. On the way you collect artifacts for the places you visited and unlock the nice corners around you one by one. Dog walkers, daily steppers and parents with a pram get a different walk every day and something new to read each time.

Building routes, walking them and reading the stories is free. Unlocking a new area costs 5 gems. You can buy gems in the app, and with some luck you find them on the way. In the 16 big cities you do not need to unlock anything.

You need a phone with mobile data and location turned on, and an account in the app. CuriFox is available for iPhone, Android and in the browser.

Unlocking takes time, it does not happen in the minute you stand there, so unlock your area the evening before. In a very sparsely built area the app sometimes finds too few places; then you get the gems back. You cannot add your own stops or questions, and the app does not work without mobile data.