Developer: Boxapixels Oy
Popularity: Very Low
Needs Download?: No
Kid-friendly: As kid-friendly as Google Maps Street View ever is, which is to say, if you let your kid outdoors at all Wuhaa! is probably fine.
Need lots of friends: Nope – there are no friend-dependent features
Spammy: No – you can post status updates if you want, but there’s no need.
Need to buy in: If you’re just going for the prizes, paying cash will speed things up, but the game is built around the assumption that you’ll win coins by playing.


Overview: Have you ever wanted to wander the streets of Madrid or Milan? Have you ever wished that your time playing Facebook games could earn you something cool? Wuhaa! is a new game from a Finnish company that uses Google Maps and a treasure-hunt game concept to let you do both of those things at once.

The concept is surprisingly simple – roam through cities using Google Maps Street View to find Wuhaa! coins. The coins themselves are large and obvious, and the hot/cold indicator is a big help, but the cities they’re placed in are huge, and you only have 45 seconds per try to find them. It’s a reasonable challenge – and the stray people and city features the Google camera caught are a very effective distraction.

Once you have some coins (found or purchased) you can stake your claim on one of the real-world prizes. They range from a vuvuzela (who doesn’t want one of those?) to a 120GB XBox Elite, with a range of CDs, DVDs, MP3 players, and the like in between. More than one person can compete for a prize, and if you spend your coins on one but don’t find it first, you’re out of luck (with a brief grace period to give you a fair chance to look.) The actual method of finding prizes is the same as finding coins, except instead of a timer, you’re competing against the other people looking for that prize, and the hot/cold meter is gone.

The city sounds are remarkably effective in giving some ambiance to the otherwise static images, although in Coin Hunt mode, the timer ticking is grating. A Leaderboard will be launching very soon, along with titles to show off your skills to your friends. We will report that although we searched for prizes, we did not find any, so can’t offer any thoughts on their fulfillment methods – however, we did find the developers extremely proactive (they fixed one bug we came across in minutes.)

Wuhaa! is a genuinely new game, and as such is a real treat to discover. It definitely feed the treasure-hunting urge, and this incorrigible rambler just loved the excuse to wander the streets of cities all over the world. It seems like a game someone should have built already, so hats off to Boxapixels Oy for getting there first. We hope to see you in Sydney or maybe Amsterdam – but hands off the vuvuzela!