Brick fairytales trail: a treasure hunt web app for coleraine connect

Coleraine connect wanted families walking through the town centre this october. We built a phone-first web app that turns 13 shop window displays into a treasure hunt, with a prize draw at the end. It had to be live by midnight on 1 october 2026, ready for the qr codes already printed in shop windows.

The challenge

Posters with qr codes were already up in 13 shop windows. They all pointed at one web address. So the app had to work by midnight on 1 october. There was no room to slip.

The audience was families on the street with a phone in hand. Nobody wants to download an app or make an account to play a game in town. It had to open fast and just work.

The rules were strict too. The competition answer could never sit in the code. No cookies. No tracking. No location data stored or sent. No toy brand styling, only the prize name.

What we built

A live map of the trail

Visitors land on a short welcome screen, then a map of coleraine town centre. Numbered brick pins mark each shop. Tap a pin to see the shop, the model in the window, directions, and a box to type the letter you find.

Progress that saves itself

Every letter saves on the visitor's own phone. A progress bar fills up and confetti pops as you go. Come back tomorrow and your trail is still there. No login needed.

Solve and enter

Once all 13 letters are found, a drag-and-drop board lets families unscramble them into a two-word phrase. A simple form then takes their entry. An instantly enter tab sits in the bottom bar for anyone ready to go.

Help without hand-holding

We chose a short how to play guide over a forced tutorial. Gentle nudges point to it from the welcome screen, the map and the info page. The guide uses made-up letters, so it never gives the game away.

How we kept it private and fair

The answer is checked on the server, never in the browser. Each entry is marked right or wrong in a private google sheet. The winner is drawn only from correct entries.

Progress lives in the phone's own local storage, not in a database. Visitor numbers come from cookieless cloudflare web analytics. Location is only used for directions and is never saved. The newsletter box is unticked by default and is not needed to enter, in line with ico guidance on cookies and consent.

Bots get caught by a hidden field. Duplicate emails get flagged. Entries are saved before the mailing list step, so a hiccup never loses an entry.

Built to run lean

The app is a progressive web app, so families can add it to their home screen like a real app. It runs on cloudflare pages, and entries go straight into google sheets. There is no server for the client to maintain.

We also wrote a plain english handover guide. Coleraine connect can change shop details, photos and map pins in one file. They can run the winner draw themselves.

Need something like this?

A campaign, a launch or a local event needs more than a pretty page. It needs something people actually use. Our web design service builds sites and web apps that win customers. If your business needs a clear look to go with it, see our branding service.

Want to see more local work? Read about the site we built for a coleraine dental practice in our new row dental case study, or browse all our work. Once you're live, our aeo service helps ai tools like chatgpt find and recommend you.

Got an idea with a hard deadline? Talk to us.