Cue that inner child because Snapchat just launched a grownup Easter egg hunt with more than a million eggs. Only instead of elbowing out other kids for candy-filled plastic eggs, Snapchat wants you to compete with friends to find the unlock the most World Lenses in an augmented reality geocaching game.
Snapchat has hidden eggs all over the Snap Map in the U.S. and Canada (from the home screen, pinch to zoom out to enter the map). Eggs are scattered throughout public locations. Once you are close to that egg on the Snap Map, tapping the egg will unlock a new World Lens, using the rear-facing camera and not the selfie one.
Plain eggs are worth one point, while the harder-to-find golden eggs are worth five points. And Snap Maps will be keeping track of those scores so egg hunters can try to beat out their friends or even the entire Snapchat community.
The hunt launched Friday, March 30, and will continue until the end of the day on Easter, April 1, at midnight ET. Unlike a real egg hunt, however, you and your friends can go find the same egg and tapping on that egg won’t prevent other egg hunters from also “scooping” up that same egg. All the eggs will remain in place until the end of the hunt.
Of course, any Snap Map feature usually comes with privacy concerns, but Snapchatters can still play the game while in Ghost Mode. Without sharing your location with friends, you won’t share your score with friends, however. Sharing the location with friends only or publicly is required to display your score to friends.
While Snapchat is a network focused, in part, on augmented reality, the Easter egg hunt is the first time the platform has launched a holiday hunt. The game mixes augmented reality with geocaching, similar to the popular Pokémon Go app. With the app’s augmented reality features and Snap Map, a virtual scavenger hunt game could make a lot of sense for the app if users decide to participate. Who knows, maybe if enough Snapchatters find those virtual eggs, other similar games could roll out too — but that is speculation since Snapchat hasn’t released an official statement about the game yet.
Now if only there was a way to get chocolate inside a virtual egg…
