Houston Data Quest in 8 minutes

🚀 Get started in 60 seconds

Three picks and you're playing. None of them lock you in — you can change your role and home neighborhood any time.

1. 1.Pick a guide character. Eight specialists (Data Detective, Permit Inspector, Park Ranger, etc.) give you a starter mission and a voice in the activity feed.
2. 2.Pick a role. Nine Houstonian roles — student, entrepreneur, contractor, community organizer, etc. — tilt the mission graph toward what you care about.
3. 3.Pick a home neighborhood. Fifteen game-canonical Houston areas. Your home unlocks the My Neighborhood leaderboard and personalizes mentor tips.

🚩 Solve real Houston problems

The whole game spins around this loop: find a red flag → turn it into an opportunity → resolve it. Every step rewards XP, money, and civic impact.

💰 Make in-game money

You start with $100. Every action moves the wallet meter on your dashboard. There are three earning paths:

• 🧭 Solo civic activity

  Browsing datasets pays a little, finding red flags pays more, submitting opportunities pays more again, and resolved opportunities pay the most ($50). Every transaction logs to your wallet ticker so you can see where the money came from.

• 🏪 Run a business team

  Start a team with kind=Business, pick an industry, then bid on any open opportunity. When an admin accepts your bid, the payout splits evenly across every team member — and the original submitter still gets their civic-impact reward.

• 🤝 Get hired by a business

  Business captains can hire other explorers with a role + hourly rate. You join their team's roster and share in their bid payouts.

🤝 Work with other Houstonians

Houston Data Quest is single-player friendly, but the real fun is multiplayer. Five ways to interact:

🎓 Meet your AI mentors

Four characters narrate your journey, each with their own voice and specialty. They pop up in your activity feed at key moments — your first red flag, your first business team, a level-up, an admin-approved idea.

🏆 Climb nine leaderboards

One board would mean only XP grinders ever made the front page. Houston Data Quest has nine — pick your lane.

🗺️ Read the Houston Game Board

The Game Board is a heat map of every game neighborhood. Each dot's size scales with population; its color signals how much civic activity is happening there right now — quiet, active, hot, hotter, hottest.

• 🔴 Red dots are the hottest neighborhoods — lots of submitted ideas, active businesses, online residents.
• ⚪ Gray dots are quiet — your team could own them with a single resolved opportunity.
• 👆 Tap a dot or table row to open the neighborhood panel: residents, businesses, open ideas, and team missions in flight.

🏅 Badges, streaks, and weekly quests

Three layered habits keep you returning day to day.

• 🔥 Daily streak

  Earn any XP in a day to bump the streak. Miss a day and you reset to 1 — unless you have a streak freeze in the bank (earned by clearing the weekly quests).

• ⚡ Daily & weekly quests

  Light objectives that refresh on a schedule (e.g. "view 3 datasets today"). Clear all weekly quests and you earn a streak freeze.

• 🏅 Badges

  Themed achievements with visible progress rings on your dashboard — Flood Scout, Permit Detective, Data Whisperer, and more. Each badge unlocks at a specific milestone.