Peekabout
Peekabout
Printables are lovely. Peekabout writes a fresh list for today's walk, today's weather, and whoever you're out with, in about five seconds on the phone you already carry.
Peekabout is a small paid scavenger hunt app, £3.99 in the UK or $3.99 in the US, paid once. You pick the biome you're in, the weather out the window, and the ages of the hunters you've got with you. About five seconds later a hunt appears: ten or so things to spot, calibrated to the walk. No login, no ads, no tracking, no subscription. The parent holds the phone. The kids explore the real world.
The scavenger-hunt-adjacent category has a few apps in it and they are doing slightly different jobs. Peekabout is the one specifically built for family walks.
Geocaching is a game for grown-ups and older kids who want to hunt for physical boxes hidden in the landscape using GPS. It rewards a particular sort of planning. Wonderful if that's your thing. Not quite what most parents are looking for when the kids need something to do on a Saturday morning.
Seek by iNaturalist is an excellent species-identification tool. Point your phone at a leaf and it tells you what it is. Brilliant for curious kids and nature-confident parents. It's an identifier, not a hunt.
Merlin Bird ID does the same thing for birds by their song. Also brilliant. Also not a hunt.
Agents of Discovery is closer in spirit: location-locked scavenger hunts made by parks, museums, and reserves. If your local reserve has one, it's lovely. The catch is one has to exist, pre-written, for the exact place you're going.
Goosechase is a scavenger hunt tool but aimed at event organisers and corporate team-building. Not really for families.
Peekabout sits in the gap: a scavenger hunt app that makes one for your specific walk, right now, for whoever you've got with you, that doesn't need GPS, a pre-scripted location, an event code, or an identifier to point at.
When you open Peekabout you pick four things. The biome, which is where you're walking: woodland, park, shore, countryside, urban, riverside, or moor. The weather, so the hunt adapts to what's actually out the window: sunny, cloudy, rainy, frosty, or snowy. The ages of whoever's hunting with you, because a four-year-old looks for different things than a nine-year-old. And how long you want the walk to be, so the list is the right length.
Peekabout reads those four choices, works out the season from today's date, and writes a fresh hunt in a few seconds. Ten or so items by default: some to spot, some to touch, some to count, sometimes something to listen for. Specific enough to feel local, flexible enough to work on a ten-minute park loop or a proper weekend walk.
Printable scavenger hunts are a lovely tradition. Crafts on Sea, the Woodland Trust, the National Park Service, and your kid's school have all released nice ones. If you've got a printer handy, a free morning, and a walk that matches the season the PDF was written for, they're brilliant.
Peekabout does a different thing. A printable from July isn't much use in November. A generic 'find a red leaf' is a strange prompt on a freezing February moor. Peekabout writes the hunt for this walk, this weather, at your kids' current ages, on the phone you were going to bring anyway. No printer. No remembering which sheet is which. You can start a hunt in the ten seconds between putting boots on and walking out the door.
No, it's £3.99 in the UK or $3.99 in the US, paid once. No subscription, no ads, no in-app purchases. Apple and Google handle the local conversion for other regions.
There's a free web sample at peekabout.app/sample if you want to try a full hunt in the browser before paying for the app.
Only briefly, to generate the hunt. Once it's on your phone, the whole thing runs offline: hints, facts, and tracking, all local. Useful for deep woodland, reserves with no signal, or the parts of anywhere where coverage is patchy.
Peekabout also ships with a built-in library of over 300 items, so you can start a hunt with no connection at all.
Yes. Enter each hunter's age at setup and Peekabout builds a single hunt calibrated for the range. Some items are aimed at the younger hunter, some at the older, some work for both. In practice this tends to mean the older one helps the younger one spot, which is how most family walks go anyway.
Seek by iNaturalist identifies species when you point your camera at them. Geocaching is a GPS-based game for finding hidden boxes in the landscape. Peekabout is a scavenger hunt: a list of things to spot on the walk you're on, calibrated to today's weather and your kids' ages.
Different jobs, no overlap, fine to use alongside each other.
More answers on the full help page, or the top fifteen on the homepage FAQ. If you want the nature-specific angle, see nature scavenger hunts for kids.
Peekabout is on the App Store and Google Play for £3.99 or $3.99, paid once. Try a free sample hunt first if you'd like.
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