How Launching A Conquista de A Coruña Went

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I’d spent the past few weeks turning this idea over in my head almost every night, never quite daring to start it for real. When I finally sat down to build it, I made myself a promise so I wouldn’t leave it half-finished again: if I hadn’t reached 6,000 players in six weeks, I’d let it go and accept that the idea, however much I liked it, didn’t matter to anyone else.

We got there with almost two weeks to spare.

Conquista da Coruña is a daily trivia game about the city’s history where you don’t compete alone: your neighborhood competes. Every day there’s a challenge (a landmark, a historical figure, an event) and you get five attempts. The points you score add to your neighborhood’s score in a war that runs the whole season. This is the story of what happened after I hit publish.

Launch night

There was no campaign, no ads, no Instagram account prepared in advance. I opened the game to a closed group of friends, coworkers from DEUS, and family: 60 people who played the first challenge without anyone asking them to. My only bet was that the neighborhood mechanic would do the rest of the work on its own: the moment someone saw their neighborhood sitting in second place by a handful of points, they’d send the link to two more neighbors.

And that’s exactly what happened, almost from the first hour. I don’t remember sleeping well that first week, checking my phone every time the player count ticked up.

The weekend the newspapers found out on their own

A few days in, El Ideal Gallego and La Opinión de A Coruña both published reviews of the game. I hadn’t sent a single press release or spoken to anyone at either paper: they found out on their own and wrote about it. It’s the validation that moved me the most out of this whole process, more than any number could: it meant the core question — “who knows A Coruña better, your neighborhood or the one next door?” — works outside a screen too, in a newsroom that had no reason to pay me any attention.

The neighborhood that took it personally

If anything has confirmed to me that this genuinely matters to people, it’s Novo Mesoiro. A few days into the game, their neighborhood wasn’t even in the top spots. Two days later they were in first place, suddenly overtaking the neighborhoods that had led since launch, and they stayed there for almost a week.

What surprised me most wasn’t that they won, but how they took it: several neighbors wrote to me, more than once, to complain that the scoring formula didn’t feel fair to them. They weren’t empty complaints — they had a point on some of it, and the formula has gone through several adjustments since then because of that real feedback. Nobody bothers writing like that about a game they don’t care about.

Weeks later, another neighborhood, Sector 7 Recinto Ferial, overtook them by just a handful of points — the tightest margin the whole season has seen. Ever since, the two have run neck and neck, trading first place back and forth like squabbling over the TV remote. Every time one overtakes the other, I find out from the messages that land in my inbox before I ever see it on the admin panel.

Two neighborhoods that asked to be let in

The game launched with 47 neighborhoods and two special categories. It didn’t take long to fall short: within days, two groups of neighbors wrote in asking for their areas to be added, since they weren’t on the original list. Adding a neighborhood wasn’t technically complicated — a content file and a script — but it did make me realize how easy it is to underestimate how much people identify with a patch of the map we hadn’t even drawn yet.

One of those two neighborhoods has barely played since. The other, Sector 7 Recinto Ferial, is exactly the one that took first place from Novo Mesoiro and now leads the whole season. Two requests that arrived the same day, with completely different outcomes.

Getting there ahead of schedule

I’d set myself six weeks as the deadline to reach 6,000 players, convinced that would be ambitious enough to actually sting if we didn’t make it. We got there with almost two weeks to spare, purely on people telling other people. It wasn’t a one-off spike: there hasn’t been a single day since launch without new players joining.

Why I did it

There’s no investment, no team, no business plan behind this. There’s a city I love, an excuse to learn by building, and the curiosity to see if it mattered to anyone else as much as it mattered to me that their neighborhood looked good on a map. I’ve been putting it together in whatever spare moments I could find, between work at DEUS and whatever I could manage at night.

What’s surprised me most isn’t reaching the goal ahead of schedule — it’s how many people have taken this genuinely seriously: the ones who write in asking for their neighborhood to be added, the ones who complain because the formula doesn’t feel fair, the ones who send screenshots of the rankings at two in the morning. You don’t get that with marketing. You get it when the place you’re talking about actually matters to people, and it turns out A Coruña is one of those places.

Thank you to the 60 who played without anyone asking them to, and to the nearly 6,000 who’ve joined since. This keeps going.

Haven’t played yet? Head to aconquista.org