ingress.com

Ingress is a free-to-download, team-based augmented reality (AR) game from Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon GO. You play as an "agent" who joins one of two global Factions, then uses the Ingress Scanner on your phone to find hidden Portals in the real world, capture them, link them into territory-spanning Fields, and coordinate with teammates. The core loop is: discover a Portal → capture or neutralize it → build Links and Fields → collaborate on larger operations. This guide walks through each step, what you need before starting, and where new agents typically get stuck.

Before You Start: What You Need

• A smartphone with GPS and a data connection. Ingress is a "geomobile" game — your real-world location drives everything.
• The Ingress app (the Scanner). Download it from your device's app store. The website's primary call to action is simply "Download Ingress."
• A Faction choice. You must pick a side before you can meaningfully play. This is the one decision you cannot easily undo, so read the next section carefully.

Step 1: Choose a Faction

At the start, you join one of two Factions locked in a hidden worldwide conflict. The lore: a secret government lab discovered Exotic Matter (XM), a substance that enters our world through hidden Portals and carries a signal that affects the human mind.

How to decide: The choice is primarily about which team you want to play with, since gameplay mechanics are the same on both sides. If you have friends already playing, join their Faction so you can collaborate — coordination is central to the game. If you're starting alone, pick whichever philosophy appeals to you; you can still meet and work with local players on your side.

Step 2: Discover Hidden Portals

Using the Ingress Scanner, you detect and discover unique Portals hidden in the world around you. Portals are tied to real locations, so playing means physically moving through your neighborhood and beyond.

What to expect: Open the Scanner and look at the map around your position. Nearby Portals appear as points you can interact with. The game rewards exploration — the New York Times noted a player who "visited her 10,000th portal in Paris, using the locations in the game as a guidebook to the city."

Common snag: If nothing appears nearby, you may simply be in a low-Portal area. Moving toward denser public spaces (downtown areas, landmarks, transit hubs) usually reveals more.

Step 3: Capture Portals

Once you find a Portal, you capture it for your Faction — or take one back from the opposing side.

• Neutral Portals can be captured directly.
• Portals held by the Rival Faction must first be neutralized.
• Portals controlled by the mysterious Machina Virus are a third threat you'll encounter and must deal with using XM weapons.

The mechanic: You use XM weapons to neutralize Portals under rival or Machina control, then deploy your own resources to claim them. Capturing a single Portal is the smallest unit of progress — it's the foundation for everything that follows.

Step 4: Build Links and Fields

This is where Ingress becomes a territory-control game rather than a Portal-collecting game.

• Link: Connect one Portal to another to extend your reach.
• Field: Link three Portals into a triangle to create a Field that covers the territory inside it.

You expand from single Portals to networks of Links spanning great distances and Fields covering large swaths of territory. The more your Faction links and fields, the more territory it controls. This is also why the game is described as "geomobile territory control" — the map you're shaping is the real world.

Practical note: Links and Fields have geometric constraints (Links can't cross existing Links, for example), so planning where to place them matters. This is a common point where new players realize the game is more strategic than it first appears.

Step 5: Collaborate With Your Team

Ingress is explicitly team-based. The website lists "Collaborate" as a core action: coordinate with your teammates to take on complex global operations and high-stakes real-world live events.

• Local coordination: Work with nearby agents to capture and hold your neighborhood.
• Global operations: Larger, planned efforts that span regions.
• Live events: The game runs real-world events (the site references "high-stake real-world live events" and lists news items like anomaly seasons and global operations).

Why it matters: A single agent can capture Portals, but large Fields and global operations require many players acting together. Joining your local Faction community is the fastest way to move from solo play to the parts of the game that generate the stories the press highlights — like players traveling to Antarctica or making new friends through the game.

Quick Reference: The Core Loop

1. Discover — Detect unique Portals around you with the Scanner.
2. Capture — Use XM weapons to neutralize rival or Machina Portals, then claim them.
3. Build — Expand from single Portals to Links and Fields covering territory.
4. Collaborate — Coordinate with teammates on operations and live events.

What You Can Decide Now

If you want a location-based game that turns your everyday surroundings into a strategic map and gives you a built-in team to play with, Ingress fits that. Start by downloading the app, then choose the Faction your friends play (or the philosophy you prefer), and begin scanning your immediate area. The first meaningful milestone is capturing a nearby Portal; the game opens up once you start linking Portals and meeting your local team.

Ingress offers official merchandise through a dedicated shop section on its site, and the items shown there are primarily faction- and event-themed apparel. The page lists three T-shirts with prices: Apollo Anomaly T-Shirt ($24.90), Battle Beacon T-Shirt ($24.90), and Year 13 Voyager T-Shirt ($34.90). If you want to show faction identity or commemorate a specific event, this is the current starting point.

What the official shop shows

The "gear up" section of ingress.com displays a small sample of merch rather than a full catalog. Based on the page evidence, the visible items are:

The "shop ingress merch" entry point is the route to browse beyond these examples. The page does not list other product categories (such as accessories, bags, or non-apparel items), so treat the T-shirt lineup as what is confirmed rather than the full range.

How the merch connects to the game

The item names map to Ingress activity rather than generic branding:

• Anomaly refers to the high-stakes real-world events mentioned on the page, where factions compete in person.
• Battle Beacon is a game term tied to portal combat.
• Year 13 points to the game's ongoing seasonal or anniversary content, consistent with the "Cygnus Anomaly Season" and other dated news items on the site.

This means the merch doubles as a record of when you played or which events you attended, not just a logo on fabric.

Who this is for

The page frames merch under "gear up" alongside the call to "choose a side" between the Enlightened and Resistance. So the practical audience is:

• Players who want to signal faction allegiance offline.
• Attendees of anomalies or live events who want a memento.
• Long-time agents marking a milestone year.

If you are brand new and still deciding between factions, there is no gameplay advantage to buying first — the merch is cosmetic and commemorative.

What to check before buying

The page confirms prices for the three shirts but does not state shipping regions, sizing, or return terms. Before ordering, verify those details at the shop entry itself, since the homepage excerpt does not cover them. Also note the listed prices are the only pricing signals available here; no discounts or bundles are mentioned.

Ingress keeps a running news & events section on its official site, and the current listing mixes season overviews, recurring bounty rotations, global operations, and level-focused weeks. If you want to know what to plan around as an agent, the items below are what the site surfaces right now. The page also links out through a "more ingress news" entry for additional coverage.

Current news and events on ingress.com

The site lists these items under news & events:

The page pairs this list with a more ingress news link, which is the entry point for anything not shown in the short list.

How to read these listings

Ingress events fall into a few recognizable shapes, and the current list reflects them:

• Seasons and Anomalies — "Cygnus Anomaly Season" is a season wrapper around Anomaly activity. Anomalies are the game's high-stakes real-world events, and the site separately promotes "high-stake real-world live events" as part of play.
• Recurring rotations — "Second Sunday Bounty Rotation — Oct 2026" is dated, which tells you it's a scheduled, repeating cadence rather than a one-off.
• Global operations — "Apollo Global Op" and "Operation Luna" are framed as operations, the kind of coordinated, multi-agent objectives the game describes under Collaborate.
• Level and campaign events — "Level 8 Week 2026" and "Corporate Synergy" read as time-boxed pushes tied to progression or a themed campaign.

What to do with this

If your goal is to participate rather than just read:

1. Open the news & events section on ingress.com and scan the current list.
2. Note any item with a date or season label — those have a window you need to act inside.
3. For operations and Anomaly content, expect coordination: the game's own framing is "Coordinate with your teammates to take on complex global operations and at high-stake real-world live events."
4. Use more ingress news when the short list doesn't cover what you're looking for.

A caveat on detail

The site gives you the names and the categories, not full schedules, locations, or participation requirements for each item. For those specifics you'll need to follow through to the individual news entries rather than relying on the summary list alone.

Ingress has two factions, and you must join one of them. The Enlightened treat Exotic Matter (XM) as a gift and a destiny, believing humanity should use its mind-enhancing properties to evolve. The Resistance treat XM as a potential threat of unknown origin that must be controlled and studied in order to protect humanity. Both factions are locked in a hidden worldwide conflict over the same substance, so your choice determines who you collaborate with and which side of that conflict you fight for.

Where the conflict comes from

According to the game's lore, a secret government research lab discovered a new substance called Exotic Matter (XM). XM enters our world through hidden Portals and carries a signal that affects the human mind, increasing intelligence and creativity in some people. The two factions formed around opposite conclusions about what that signal means for humanity.

The two factions compared

The disagreement is not about whether XM exists or whether it changes people — both factions accept that. The split is over whether that change should be embraced or contained.

What choosing a side actually changes

• Who you collaborate with. Ingress is team-based, so your faction is the group you coordinate with for Links, Fields, and larger operations.
• Who you fight. You use XM weapons to neutralize Portals controlled by the rival faction, or by the mysterious Machina Virus.
• What you're fighting for. The game frames the choice as "what will you fight for?" — evolution or protection.

Your day-to-day actions are the same either way: detect and discover Portals with the Ingress Scanner, capture them, build networks of Links and Fields, and coordinate with teammates. The faction decides whose interests those actions serve.

How to decide

If the idea of XM as something humanity should embrace and grow through appeals to you, the Enlightened framing fits. If you'd rather see an unknown influence on the human mind studied and kept under control, the Resistance framing fits. Since the choice shapes your teammates and your side in the conflict, it's worth picking the view you'd actually argue for — you'll be acting on it every time you capture a Portal.

Ingress is a free-to-download, location-based augmented reality (AR) game by Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon GO. It's a team game played in the real world: you move through physical space, discover hidden "Portals" on a map, and fight to control territory for one of two global Factions. If you're deciding whether it's worth installing, the short answer is that Ingress rewards walking, exploring, and coordinating with other players far more than it rewards sitting at home — and it's built around a persistent worldwide conflict rather than a single-player campaign.

What kind of game is Ingress?

The site describes it as "worldwide, team-based, geomobile territory control." In practice that means three things:

• Location-based. You play by physically moving to real-world locations. The game uses your phone's location to place Portals at actual places around you.
• Team-based. Every player joins one of two Factions locked in a hidden conflict, and much of the deeper play requires coordinating with teammates.
• Territory control. You don't just collect things — you capture Portals, link them together, and create Fields that cover real geographic areas for your Faction.

This is not a game you finish. It's an ongoing, shared map that changes as players around the world act on it.

The two Factions

At the center of the game's story is a substance called Exotic Matter (XM), discovered at a secret government research lab. XM enters the world through hidden Portals and carries a signal that affects the human mind. The two Factions disagree about what that means:

You choose a side when you begin, and that choice shapes who you cooperate with and who you compete against. The conflict is framed as hidden and taking place all around you, which is why the game leans on exploration and secrecy rather than visible arenas.

Core gameplay loop

The site lays out four activities that make up the basic loop:

1. Discover — Detect and discover unique Portals hidden in the world around you using the Ingress Scanner.
2. Capture — Use XM weapons to neutralize Portals controlled by the Rival Faction or by the mysterious Machina Virus.
3. Build — Expand from single Portals to networks of Links spanning great distances, and to Fields covering large areas of territory.
4. Collaborate — Coordinate with teammates on complex global operations and at real-world live events.

The progression from one Portal to Links to Fields is the key mechanic: a single captured Portal is a local action, but linking Portals and closing Fields turns it into a territorial claim that other players can see and contest. That's what makes teamwork matter — large operations usually require several people in different places acting together.

Who it's for

Ingress suits players who:

• Enjoy walking or traveling and want a reason to explore unfamiliar places.
• Like competitive, persistent multiplayer where the map is shared with real people.
• Are willing to coordinate with a team, since the biggest objectives are hard to pull off alone.

It's a weaker fit if you want a self-contained story you can complete solo, or if you'd rather play without moving around.

Real-world impact and events

The game has a documented habit of pushing players to go further than they otherwise would. The New York Times described a player who made many new friends through Ingress and visited her 10,000th Portal in Paris, using in-game locations as a guidebook to the city. VICE noted that Antarctica's remoteness is part of what makes it appealing to avid Ingress players. WIRED recounted a player who said she never would have done something on her own, but that day "she was Jason Bourne."

Niantic also runs high-stakes real-world live events and anomaly seasons, which the site lists alongside news and merchandise. These are the points where the global conflict becomes a physical gathering.

How to start

1. Download the Ingress app.
2. Choose a Faction — The Enlightened or The Resistance.
3. Open the Scanner and begin detecting Portals near you.
4. Capture your first Portals, then start linking them and coordinating with nearby teammates.

The site's own framing for new players is direct: "the fate of our world is in your hands, agent." Whether you treat that as story or as a reason to walk a few extra blocks is up to you — but the game is designed so that the walking is the point.