Ingress First Saturday events are officially recognized community-organized and community-run cross-faction Ingress events. While there are individual competitive elements, Ingress First Saturdays are not intended to be faction versus faction events. These events take place on the first Saturday of every month.
 
What is the purpose of an Ingress First Saturday event?
The purpose of these events is to gather Agents from a local community in a social setting, have a shared Ingress experience, and provide an opportunity to onboard new players. An Ingress First Saturday is not an alternative for a Mission Day. Do not require players to do missions banners to participate in these events. Missions as part of an in-game scavenger hunt are ok.
 
What is Niantic’s role in Ingress First Saturday events?
Because these are community-organized grassroots events, Niantic’s role is very limited. Niantic will:
  • assist in marketing the events via social media and direct push messages.
  • provide the requirements for an officially recognized Ingress First Saturday event.
  • setup any special Portals that are required.
  • distribute any rewards associated with the event to Fev Games, the organizers, or directly to players.
  • provide organizers with a digital logistics kit of printable materials.
Rewards may include but are not limited to AP bonuses equal to the AP the Agent gained during the event (first hack to last hack), passcodes, and awarding the Ingress First Saturday medal. These will be granted the week following the event.
 
Note: that the levels of the First Saturday medal are 1-6-12-24-36 events, for bronze-silver-gold-platinum-onyx, respectively. This medal will not be retroactively applied.
 
Niantic will not be responsible for identifying or securing a venue. All costs associated with hosting an Ingress First Saturday event are the responsibility of the organizers.
 
What is the role of Fev Games in Ingress First Saturday events?
The volunteers at Fev Games have offered to help Agents organize Ingress First Saturday events. If you want your event to be officially recognized and eligible for rewards, you must register your city with Fev Games at https://fevgames.net/ifs-reg/.
 
Fev Games will also:
  • communicate best practices to event organizers.
  • distribute passcodes to event organizers.
  • collect, process, and publish the results of the events.
So you want to host an Ingress First Saturday, now what?
 
As an organizer, you will need to:
  • identify a person willing to act as a co-organizer from the opposite Faction. Having cross-faction organizers is required.
  • identify and obtain cross-faction agreement on a venue or meeting place.
  • determine the format of your Ingress First Saturday event.
  • determine if you want to provide prizes or not.
  • determine the existing Portal that needs to be hacked by participants to check themselves in.
  • determine the start time of the event.
  • determine the existing Portal you want to be the Social/Restocking Portal for the social post-event location.
  • determine the start time for social post-event location.
Once you have all of that information figured out, you will need to register your event with Fev Games at https://fevgames.net/ifs-reg/.
 
What is the general flow to an Ingress First Saturday event?
  • 60 min before the event starts: Registration Portal goes live
  • 60-45 min before the event starts: People show up at a gathering spot.
  • 30 min before the event starts: Organizers provide a welcome speech and explain the event format.
  • 15 min before the event starts: A group picture is taken.
  • Event Start: People hack the Registration Portal.
  • Two hour event window: Participants do the in-game event activities.
  • Event window ends: People meetup at the social post-event location.
  • 30 minutes after event window ends: Social/Restocking Portal goes live (lasts for 60 minutes)
  • Social event starts: Everyone has a good time.
  • Social event ends: Agents responsibly get themselves home.
How long should the in-game portion of an Ingress First Saturday last?
A good rule of thumb is to keep the in-game portion of an Ingress First Saturday limited to two hours. You’ll want time at the end to socialize at your venue/meeting location.
 
How long should the social portion of an Ingress First Saturday last?
You may be limited by the venue or have other constraints. Generally, a couple of hours is good enough though.
 
What are the requirements to host an Ingress First Saturday event?
  • One organizer from each Faction.
  • Register your city with Fev Games 14 days in advance. If you do not register by the deadline, your city will not have an official Ingress First Saturday and it will not be listed on the ingress.com/events website.
  • Secure a venue or gathering spot.
  • Take a group photo and post it to social media with the hashtag #IngressFS.
  • Choose a place for people to socialize after the in-game events (reserving a restaurant with a nearby portal is great, but it can also be just choosing a park or other location).
  • Determine your event format and create any supporting assets for it.
How is registration and check-In handled?
We recommend you create a Google Form that asks at a minimum for the following information so you can predict attendance:
  • Agent name
  • Email address
  • Faction
  • Add a required checkbox for the following statement:
    • I agree to share this information with Ingress First Saturday organizers for the purposes of administering this event. I understand that Ingress First Saturday organizers are not official representatives of Niantic.
Check-In for players is a single-step process on the day of the event.
When you register your event with Fev Games you will be asked for the location of the registration Portal. Players will need to hack this Portal in order to be eligible to receive rewards from Niantic. Make sure you tell them… multiple times.
 
What are some ideas for the event format?
Sometimes, Ingress First Saturdays may overlap with other special events. It is acceptable, and in fact encouraged, to leverage these for your event format and player experience.
 
Some event ideas (REMEMBER: The in-game activities should only last two hours):
  • Encoded Portal Lists:
    • Create multiple lists of Portals whose names or GPS coordinates are encoded.
    • Have the participants form cross-faction teams.
    • Give each team an encoded list.
    • Require participants to have to hack these Portals to get a key for each.
    • You can also encrypt the Portal titles using a password and make having to figure out the password part of the game.
  • Dead Drop Portal Hunts:
    • Purchase some anti-static bags and hide them around town. The bags can contain prizes, coded Intel to find the next dead drop, or a redemption card that can be brought to organizers to receive a prize.
    • You can either take pictures of the dead drops and provide them to participants or simply make a list of locations (not exact coordinates but within 100-200m or so) that can be handed out.
      • Alternately, you can provide information about the first Portal and have the clues for the next Portal be in the first dead drop.
    • This information can be divided into groups and handed out to teams.
    • The first team to find all of the dead drops wins a prize.
  • Mission Based Scavenger Hunts
    • Using the Mission Creator tool you can create multiple in-game scavenger hunt missions.
    • To do this you will want to create multiple sequential hidden missions.
      • Select “Sequential” from the Mission Type screen.
      • Make sure to check the box “Hide waypoint location and provide location clues”
      • All Portals in your mission should have an objective of “Hack this Portal”.
      • Every Portal except the first one will prompt you for a “Location Clue”.
    • Have the participants break up into cross-faction teams and tell each team which mission they will be doing.
    • As long as the Missions are submitted at least a week in advance and have the #IngressFS hashtag in the title, First Saturday missions will be fast-tracked and responded to. Note that this does not guarantee approval: your mission can still be rejected if it does not follow all standard mission requirements.
       
      First Saturday missions are recommended to have 1 mission per site, and are limited to a strict maximum of 6 missions per site so that we do not overload the fast track team. Please do not overuse this fast tracking. Please retire your First Saturday missions after the event, in order to avoid cluttering the local mission list.
  • Stat Based Play
    • Organizers are free to keep track of any statistic or multiple statistics. Some fun stats to add to the mix are:
      • Levels gained
      • AP gained
      • KMs walked
      • Glyph points
      • Resonators Deployed/Resonators Destroyed
      • Links created
      • Mind Units captured
      • Portals Captured/Portals Neutralized
      • Mods deployed
      • Longest link (make it a team competition and add the distance up)
      • Number of hacks
  • Human Based Shard Game
    • Break the group up into two cross-faction teams.
    • Designate one person in each team to be a shard.
    • Designate a starting Portal for each team and a target Portal for each team.
    • Get the person from the starting Portal to the target Portal using in-game links.
      • How and when the person moves is up to your imagination.
      • Have the person place a beacon on a Portal they are on so the team knows they cannot use that Portal again.
    • The first team to successfully get their shard/person to the target Portal wins.
  • Capsule-Soccer
    • Aim: Pass a capsule as many times between same-faction team-mates as possible.
    • Divide participants into faction-teams. Designate a receiver by flipping a coin. First receiver gets a capsule with 1x Reso (If RES) or 1x Burster (If ENL). Capsule ID is recorded by Orga
      • Receivers are allowed to take 5 to 10 steps before they have to drop the capsule, and may not pick it up again if they held it before
      • First person to pick that capsule up announces it, loads either 1 reso (if RES) or 1 burster (if ENL) and continues
      • Play until capsule is full and/or allotted time has passed and/or destination point has been reached
      • Winning faction determined by the amount of resos vs bursters in the capsule(s).
      • Depending on attending numbers, more than one capsule can be used.
Are you required to take a group picture?
Yes. Post it to social media using the hashtag #IngressFS. This is required in order to make your event eligible for rewards.
 

Interested in running other events? Check out Mission Days!