A card game that gets families outside

Most of the game works anywhere: Play Anywhere builds a deck for a backyard, a trail or a city sidewalk. But the heart of it is the featured places — Massachusetts parks and historic sites with challenges written for what is actually there, from a boulder people sharpened tools on to the bellows of a seventeenth-century ironworks.

Each park page says how long to allow, where to park and what it costs, whether a stroller works and whether there are bathrooms, so a parent can decide before getting in the car.

Every fact on a park page comes from the park’s own sources: the state, the National Park Service, The Trustees, Mass Audubon or the town that looks after it. Each factual sentence is kept beside the sentence from the source it came from, so a person can compare the two before it is published, and the sources are re-read automatically afterwards so a change at the park — a closed tower, a new fee — gets caught.

A person reads every card before it reaches the app. And a park page says plainly whether a family has actually played it there yet, or whether it has only been researched.

Parks change faster than any page can. Before you go, check hours and fees on the park’s own site, which each park page links to. If a card does not work at a park, the app has a button to tell us, and that is how we find out.

There is nothing to sign up for. The app shows no advertising and runs no analytics, and your photos and finished games stay on your phone. The privacy policy says exactly what is and is not sent.

Play Anywhere and three featured places are free. The Explorer Pass opens every other featured place — the pricing page has the details.

Something wrong on a page, or a park you would like to see? [email protected].