A free real-world game is sending players to our public payphones and turning the network into a competitive map. Here's what it is, how it works, and how to play.
Payphone Tag is a free, real-world game that turns our public payphones into a national competition. Players sign up online, get a five-digit PIN, walk to a payphone, dial in, and capture it for points.
It isn't ours. Payphone Tag was built by Alex Allchin, an independent Australian developer, on top of a dataset of payphone locations he'd quietly been collecting. What started as a side project has turned into a street-level phenomenon: players walking neighbourhoods they don't usually visit, younger Australians dialling a payphone for the first time, older Australians rediscovering one out of nostalgia.
It also lands at a useful moment. Since August 2021, when we made all standard national and mobile calls from payphones free, Australians have made more than 100 million free calls from them. They've kept remote communities connected. They've stayed up during natural disasters when mobile networks have gone down. They've taken the annual rush of calls to Santa. And now, for a few months at least, they're recording captures too.
TLDR: Payphone Tag is a free territory game played on Telstra's public payphones. Capture a phone by calling 07 LOAD TALK (07 5623 8255) and entering your PIN. Hold turf, build triangles, climb the leaderboard.
Capture payphones. Hold territory. Defend it before someone calls in and takes it back. That's the game.
Each player (an "agent") signs up at payphonetag.com and gets an emoji identifier and a private five-digit PIN. A map shows nearby payphones. To capture one, walk to it, pick up the handset, dial 07 LOAD TALK (07 5623 8255), and enter your PIN when prompted. The phone is yours, until another player calls from it with their own PIN and steals it back.
The call costs nothing. Calls from any of our payphones in Australia have been free since August 2021.
Points reward both exploration and defence.
So you can rack up points for each new phone you take, or by holding a cluster long enough to chain them into triangles. The best agents do both.
Cells are optional teams of up to 12 agents. Create a Cell once you've captured three payphones, or join an existing one with an invite code. When Cell members hold all three corners of a triangle, that area counts as Cell territory and feeds the team leaderboard.
Skip your PIN and dial in with "PARTY" (72789) instead. You're dropped into an open conference with anyone else who's done the same. No captures, no points, just a public payphone line in the most literal sense.
