Some of you may have heard of this phone app. I contributed to the funding of this game on kickstarter about a year ago, and in the past few weeks they opened a beta release - initially only to those near London while they test their programming.

http://runanempire.com/

the tl;dr is:

• By running through territory on the map, you capture it.
• If you run in a closed loop, you capture all territory enclosed by the loop.
• The game map is the real world.

So as a game mechanic it rewards consistency of running, but also variation of routes. By contrast strava rewards going fast. I think that this is a more useful way to gamify training.

It's probably a little while before it opens to general release, but as one of the lucky ones with early access it has rejuvenated my running. I'm exploring my city like I'm in it for the first time - but all I'm doing is following my training plan.