Round winners – February 2025 (Round #176)
Congratulations to the winners of round February 2025: féarglas from Scotland turfed home her 7th Gold, Cruachan from Scotland took his second Silver and Király from Skåne added another Bronze to his row of medals. Well done mates!
Upcoming events
If you are organising an open event, don't forget to write to insider@turfgame.com a couple of months in advance to get the information about your event into the newsletter :)
LuleåIce25, 15th of March in Luleå, Sweden
After the success of last year, LuleåIce is back. Information and how to sign up is found HERE
SåsTurf, 5th of April in Alingsås, Sweden
MaXi wants you to come and compete in two open Events at the very end of this round. Join him in his home town by foot or by bike or both :) You can read more about it HERE (only in Swedish). You can compete in one Event or in both. There will be a prize to the turfer who takes most points combined in the two Events. Go go go!
Åland Open, 24th of May in Mariehamn, Åland
For the second time, Mariehamn (Åland) will host two Events on the same day.
Bonanza 2025: 7th of June in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Please pre-register your interest by completing this form, and join the fun. As of 2nd of April, most of us will need an ETA to travel to the UK. Read more HERE. It opens for application on the 5th of March.
Bonanza 2025 is coming to Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 7th, and we are very excited to welcome you all for a fun weekend of Turf. Information is coming this week to https://www.esoc.org.uk/info/bonanza-2025-scotland
For walks with a worthy view within a day trip of Edinburgh, the Fife Coastal Path is a sign-posted (and zoned) path from Kincardine to Newburgh, around the Fife coast. It can be broken in to sections for day trips, with bus and train options to get to/from the starting/end points. It takes in lovely fishing towns such as Elie, Anstruther, Crail, and of course, St. Andrews. This is definitely worth a visit for the long sandy beach, the historic buildings, and yes - the golf course. https://fifecoastandcountrysidetrust.co.uk/walks/fife-coastal-path/
Dundee is a city with many interesting attractions, and just a 90 minute drive or 70 minute train journey from Edinburgh. You will find the award winning V&A dedicated design museum, the Science Centre, and Mills Observatory. You can experience life in the Antarctic with Captain Scott on the RRS Discovery, explore the forests and wildlife centre at Camperdown Park, enjoy the walk along the river Tay and the beach area at Broughty Ferry. And of course - see the famous Desperate Dan sculptures - a Dundonian legend!
Further along the coast, Carnoustie has a lovely promenade, and is another world leading golf destination with three superb golf courses. A particular favourite of mine is Arbroath, settled in the 12th century and home of the renowned Arbroath Smokie. Arbroath Abbey is in the centre of the town, the old harbour is still active, and the sandstone cliffs are stunning. More suggestions in the next Insider!
Uppsala2025, 28th of June in Uppsala, Sweden
Uppsala2025 will be held on the 28th of June. It will contain foot, bike and water zones, and might also have some fun event-quests alongside the actual competition. We will most definitely have dinner, but where it will be is not yet planned. Sign up HERE.
Some turfers discovered during February that the Turf app disappeared from the App store (where iPhone users get their hands on Turf). It was a bureaucracy hang up, but it has now been fixed. So spread the word again among your friends with iPhone, Turf has returned!
It looks like Turf Awards is taking a break this year. This is due to lack of time from the Crew member organising it. It will return. Everything Crew does, is done in our spare time for free, and sometimes life just gets in the way of all the fun things Turf brings into our lives.
Turf Insider asked MaXi to tell us about his goals during a round. This is his story:
A normal round for MaXi
Goals. With turfers there’s almost as many goals with turfing as there are turfers. For me the thing that currently holds most interest, well except for growing my row of event medals, is the Jack of all trades toplist, “my toplist standings”, on warded. To get up in ranking I've mostly been focusing on Revists, Assists, Turfers taken zones from and Takes from neutral, but i do every toplist when I get the chance.
My round start usually takes me to Lidköping where I like to challenge myself to try and get the yellow leader t-shirt. Doing it in Lidköping with its high take points is a lot easier than doing it in my hometown of Alingsås where it would be almost impossible to keep up with the Germans and Electric bike turfers.
In the first week of a new Turf round, I sometimes do short road trips to nearby towns to get more takes from neutrals if I have time and energy for it. These trips also provide a comfy baseline of pph and a nice change of scenery! Highly recommend switching the scenery while turfing from time to time :)
The rest of the weeks of the round are usually pretty “normal”. I do afternoon and night time rides on my beloved gravel bike a couple of times a week while keeping a lookout for potential revists and all the other stuff that can advance me on the Jack of all trades toplist. I also keep an eye on the leagues where I like to stay in League 4. I find it a pretty chill place while it also keeps me from becoming too lazy. Finally I want to share with you one of my face zones.
Did you know...
...403 386 medals have been awarded so far to 116 662 turfers
...there are 2 medals no one has taken so far (Roundpointer–3 M and Take-500000)
Turf Picture of the Month
February's Turf Picture of the Month is from the zone LunaParkFace by TheInquisitor. It was hard to choose this month, from many good pictures. Keep 'em coming!
If you have a Zone picture you want featured as Turf Picture of the Month, send it to insider@turfgame.com Please include your Turf nick for recognition!
Turfa lugnt/Safe turfing!
//Munin
Please, send your story to insider@turfgame.com :) C'mon and share your big and small stories with the Turf world. I know you have a fave zone you'd like to the Turf world about ;) Or a meeting in a zone or story from a local Turf get-together.
This Turf Insider will cover two rounds, since I have been on a long vacation.
Round winners – December 2024 (Round #174) and January 2025 (Round #175)
Congratulations to the winners of round December 2024: Király from Skåne decided he wanted another Gold, uppuppuppner from Västra Götaland went for Silver and IndoorsyHermit from Skåne added a Bronze to his Gold. Well done mates!
Congratulations to the winners of round January 2025: sarasota from Halland secured a first Gold, nicos from Berlin took his second Silver and uppuppuppner took his second Bronze. Well done mates!
There has been requests to interview the top achievers in the rounds, Turf Insider does not have the possibility to do this. But if you, as a private turfer, wants to do it and send the piece to insider@turfgame.com, it will for sure get published. This goes for texts about just anything Turf related. I, Munin, see myself more as an Editor of Turf Insider than the sole writer of it. I believe it will be a more interesting News letter, if it contains content from more than one person. So, please send me your stories, big and small, personal or more general. If I, by some miracle, will get an avalance of mail in the next weeks, I will have to save some stories for later. Just remember, I might edit your piece a bit to make it fit in Turf Insider. English is the preferred language, but if you want you can write it in your native language, and I will translate together with Google :)
Upcoming events
If you are organising an open event, don't forget to write to insider@turfgame.com a couple of months in advance to get the information about your event into the newsletter :)
LuleåIce25, 15th of March in Luleå, Sweden
After the success of last year, LuleåIce is back. Information and how to sign up is found HERE.
Åland Open, 24th of May in Mariehamn, Åland
For the second time, Mariehamn (Åland) will host two Events on the same day.
Bonanza 2025: 7th of June in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The first Bonanza outside of Sweden will be held in Edinburgh in June 2025, and is a must for all. Please pre-register your interest by completing this form, and join the 48 already pre-registered. See you in Edinburgh!
As of 2nd of April, most of us will need a ETA to travel to UK. Read more HERE. It opens for applicaion on the 5th of March.
Uppsala2025, 28th of June in Uppsala, Sweden
Kygni is organising an Event this summer in the town he started turfing in. It will be a 3 hour Event, with zones on both land and in the water. Stay tuned!
Uppsala is a very active Turf City with lots of local turfers and many zones. If you have never been to Uppsala, June is a very nice time to visit :)
Report from Turf Skåne's "Nyårslöftet" by Kingslayer
Turf Skåne traditionally hosts the first event every year - Nyårslöftet (“The New Year’s resolution”) which is a 90 minute foot event that takes place on January 1st. For the first time since the start in 2017 we had to postpone it a few days this year due to the weather – turfing in a park full of old trees in storm is likely not a good idea. The event was postponed until January 5th and instead of storm the participants had to navigate icy paths in Malmö Kungspark. Unexperienced mugglers was seen diving and sprawling on the ground, but none of the participants had any accidents. Winner of the event was Podde who took a bus and train from the darkest of Småland just to participate. He was followed by IndoorsyHermit, ZepLeddelin (who has participated in all Nyårslöften since the start) and mrSpock. If you visit Skåne over New Year holidays remember that we (almost) always host this event on January 1st!
From left: Podde, mrSpock, IndoorsyHermit and ZepLeddelin.
When you travel outside of the official Turf countries, you often feel that Turf zones are lacking. You might even feel zones are lacking in official Turf countries in your next vacation spot. The zone makers in Crew, makes zones in their spare time and so far the order of importance has been Official Turf Countries first followed by a few special projects such as World Heritage Zones. Requests for zones of a more touristy nature, have been of a lower priority, and most often not acted upon when a turfer discovers they have planned a vacation to a zone desert and at the last minute written about it in social media. It is discussed now and then in Crew how to handle requests in non-official Turf countries. Usually what it boils down to, is time. Zone makers make zones in their free time and we can't make zones everywhere, so we have to have a priority list. In general, touristy zones are made in locations with a lot of tourists, such as Paris, Spain and Thailand. We are also not all-knowingly about good places to make zones and that is why we often refer to the Forum.
However, the Forum has its issues. It is often the victim of Spam attacks. If you get an Error message when trying to log in, be patient and try again later. It is not something you have done, that prevents you from logging in. Using your allocated Zone Suggestions in the Turf app every round to make zone suggestions, is also a good way to help with making new zones. Most zone makers use this feature of the zone creation tool. Zone makers are required to read the Forum, but are not required to act on the suggestions/request. The Forum is also sometimes hard to navigate. If the area/city is not stated in the title of the post in the Forum, it is very hard for the zone maker to know if the post is in an area they at the moment is responsible for. I do not read thru all the posts in the Forum, I am only interested in the posts regarding those areas I am currently responsible for. And we change area responsibility every 4 months. Also, it is hard to know at a glance which suggestions have been acted upon by other zone makers.
And remember, suggestions are only suggestions, as is the name you have given your suggestion. For information, there is no Turf factory that reviews the proposals received in turn and stamps them with "yes" or "no". How it works (in Sweden and in UK) is that a zone maker has 4 months to add a certain number of allocated zones per area. In the job description, it is said that Forum threads for the relevant area should be read (however, nothing is said about interacting or that these zone proposals have a higher priority). In the Forum, the suggester can add information that may not be obvious on the map. If you go this way, it is a very good idea to make sure that the name of the area (in Sweden, the municipality=kommun) is in the subject line, in order to identify the post to the correct zone maker. The zone maker can however put the zones whereever s/he wants.
During zone making, the suggestions made by all turfers in the app, can be shown on the map in the zone creation tool and the suggestions become a kind of heatmap of interest. Or just a blurr, because all proposals since 2012 that have not been realized show up. If you click on a suggestion, you can see the zone name and when it was suggested, but not by whom. So, it's a lottery if your suggestion will become a zone or not. You can choose to pick up your tickets every round and have a slightly higher chance of getting zones where you want them, or not. But don't look at a zone suggestion as something that will automatically lead to a zone in a certain place within a limited time. Maqqan wrote a very good Blog post about zone making some years ago, I think it is still a very good piece on the subject. You can find it HERE (original post from 2016) and an updated version from 2020 HERE.
And as always, remember that most things done by Crew, is done for free on a volunteer basis. We do our best with the time we have.
Did you know...
...there are still 27 turfers in the Daily-5 race that began on the 4th of September, 2021.
...you can check your progess in the Daily-5 HERE.
Turf Picture of the Month
Decmber's Turf Picture of the Month is from the zone ÅhlsKyrka by Lola_Lola
January's Turf Picture of the Month is from the zone AlléFotboll by eastmo.
If you have a Zone picture you want featured as Turf Picture of the Month, send it to insider@turfgame.com Please include your Turf nick for recognition!
Turfa
lugnt/Safe turfing!
//Munin
...if you want to contribute to future Turf Insiders, send your story to insider@turfgame.com :) C'mon and share your big and small stories with the Turf world.
Round winners – November 2024 (Round #173)
Congratulations to the winners of round November 2024, a round of firsts and upgrades for each: Fashven from Scotland turfed home his first Gold to add to his three silvers, Nicos from Berlin added his first Silver to his bronze, and magnusn from Stockholm, with his first Top 3 finish and his first C, took the Bronze medal. Well done all!
Upcoming events
If you are organising an open event, don't forget to write to insider@turfgame.com a couple of months in advance to get the information about your event into the newsletter :)
December is Advent Calendar time! There are again two to keep you entertained and challenged this year. There is still time to join in, with both allowing tasks to be completed by end-Dec. Thank you to Turf Skåne and PlanetGary.
- Following tradition Turf Skåne have an X-mas calendar with turf missions and book prizes, as usual starting 01 Dec. The tasks can be found here https://turfskane.com/julkalendern-2024/
- Welcome to the PG Turf Advent Calendar 2024, devilishly devised and craftily created by the mischievous editor of Planet Gary for turfers anywhere in the Multiverse to try their hand at, pull their hair out and most likely scream with frustration. Who will win the prestigious Golden Turfman?, a unique special award lovingly hand-crafted in the Planet Gary Bike Shed. See the famous PG blog for notes on how to partake, and the daily tasks - https://planetgary.org.uk/pg-advent-notes-2024/
2025 begins with a bang, or maybe a calm gathering of turfers at the traditional Turf Skåne Nyårslöftet, now in it's ninth year. It is a closed foot event, and will be held in Malmö this time on 1st January 2025. More info here: https://turfskane.com/2024/10/26/nyarsloftet-2025/
LuleåIce'25 will be held Saturday, March 15, 2025, following the success of the first LuleåIce event last year. It is an open event on the ice outside the centre of Luleå, with the same concept as LuleåIce'24 i.e. skates, skis, run, walk, but not bike or anything with a motor. More info will come at the beginning of 2025.
Congratulations to the winners at LusseTurf in Västerås on 8th December 2024! The prizes went to Gusmasen in first, ripe in second, and to MrSnyten in third place.
Bonanza 2025: 7th of June in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The first Bonanza outside of Sweden will be held in Edinburgh in June 2025, and is a must for all. Planning is in progress for a fun-filled long weekend, with the Bonanza itself on June 7th, and extra events such as ESOCWalter's legendary 'Crazy' event around it. Come and enjoy Edinburgh City with it's seven hills and climb our volcano - Arthur's Seat. Or walk/cycle along the Firth of Forth at Cramond and Portobello. Take the World Heritage zone at the Forth Rail Bridge, neigh at the Kelpies, wonder at the Falkirk Wheel (that is a beam!) Glasgow, Stirling, Inverness - with nearly 13 thousand zones in Scotland, and two English regions nearby, you won't be short of things to do. Please pre-register your interest by completing this form, and join the 48 already pre-registered. See you in Edinburgh!
A favourite get-away to the west coast of Scotland
One of my (féarglas) favourite places to visit in Scotland is the island of Great Cumbrae, by Largs, and nearby Ardrossan and Irvine on the west coast. A short ferry ride from Largs, Cumbrae is sometimes referred to as the ‘Island of a Thousand Bicycles’, though possibly an exaggeration compared to a busy Stockholm cycle path! It has a (zoned) 16km circular cycle around the coastline, with spectacular scenery and stunning panoramas.
My favourite spot/zone is FintrayBay, where I sit and enjoy delicious ice-cream while soaking up the peace and beauty of the bay. You pass a memorial to two Midshipmen of HMS Shearwater, which sank close to the Northern part of the island in 1844, and 'Hush Hush', a WWII listening post. Novelty rocks seem to be a thing with the unusually painted Indian Rock, the shapely Lion Rock, and the fun Crocodile Rock in Millport town. This is one of the island's most iconic fun landmarks, a must have photo. The Cathedral of The Isles, also in Millport, is Britain’s smallest Cathedral and was my unique 7500 zone in May 2022, a moment shared with my son on our wee road trip.
Turf Goals for 2025?
As 2024 draws to a close and 2025 approaches, you may be thinking of setting a Turf goal for next year. Possibly it will be just to stay in the same division or maybe to get that wanted medal or rank, attend the bonanza in Scotland, or maybe even a country explorer? Many ways to play, many goals to choose from, something for everyone.
ChilliFarmer went ambitious with his goals in 2024 - to win 12 consecutive R (region) medals. And he has done it! - winning his 12th consecutive R (region) medal on 1st December. Bravo! From his home region of North West England to further away South West England, there were 4 different regions amongst the 12 wins - the other two being East Midlands and Wales. All conquered in 2024.
There was a strategy to make the most of living near a region boundary. Rather than just take the same zones each round to potentially win his home region of North West England, he took an equal numbers of zones in three or four regions. This gave an opportunity to choose the easiest target towards the end of each round. He also needed to understand and predict, for each region in each round, what other turfers in these regions were likely to do. And had to watch out for anyone else also trying to steal. (I am reminded of ESOCWalter and his R medals in NE & NW England, changing regions in the dying hours of the round. Just 10 minutes before round end for NE England!)
There are not many active turfers where he lives and most zones are only worth +1. Less interesting than turfing in Sweden. If you pick unpopular areas here, it is possible to hold some zones all round. However, you need thousands of them to get a big score, which requires lots of travel and planning and turfing in new areas. His highest round total points was 1,813,929 points, in round 168, setting a new North West region record, and while not enough for the gold nor the silver medals (??!), it secured him a bronze medal.
The hardest part of the challenge was not telling anyone about it, for fear of getting 11 months in and then someone disrupting it. It was a nervous time for the 12th R, with only a few days of his year long challenge remaining. Unknowingly, FeTaTo turned up on a unique hunt when ChilliFarmer was in South West England. Particularly worrying, as she busied herself taking zones, but luckily on this occasion, she had already taken more in Skåne earlier in the round and did not move over to SW. Phew, the 12th R was secured.
ChillFarmer's goal for 2025 might be a bit easier - any 12 medals. Whilst you can never have enough R/region medals, there are some easier medals such as aquaman, trainer or assists.
Turf Picture of the Month
This months Turf Picture of the Month is from Rymprak. It was taken during the "All light on Uppsala" - light festival (8-24/11)
If you have a Zone picture you want featured as Turf Picture of the Month, send it to insider@turfgame.com Please include your Turf nick for recognition!
Turfa lugnt/Safe turfing! And wishing Munin a fabulous holiday down under!
//féarglas
(If anyone has received the email twice, sorry!)
...if you want to contribute to future Turf Insiders, send your story to insider@turfgame.com :) C'mon and share your big and small stories with the Turf world.
A new android version is now released after a few weeks of beta-testing.
The update mainly provides a new suporter page, but also includes other improvements.
We are now dropping support for android version 7 and below in order to give everyone else a better experience. 0,5% of our android users are affected and need to upgrade their OS.
2.1.36
-German supporter-page fix
-German translations updated
2.1.35 -New supporter page
2.1.32
-Improved app-is-active notification
-Removed support for android 7.X
-Background improvements
-Improved supporter payment process
