EpicWin: Turn your nasty chores into epic quests!

Today was a great day for QUESTS! I throw away the rubbish, I bought coffee, I even helped my wife cleaning up our house in the countryside...


To be honest, it was a pretty normal day, but thanks to a new, magical iPhone app, any boring day is good for glorious deeds. 
This is EpicWin's cunning plan: turn your boring, everyday chores into epic quests. And it works, surprisingly: my wife already witnessed an increase in my productivity helping around the house today... whether it will last, only time can tell.
EpicWin was heralded weeks ago by a funny and catchy trailer:

...if you, like me, ever played D&D or any other role-playing game you'll love this app. Today it was finally released in the App Store for $2.99 (with optional $0.99 in-app purchases), and another remarkable promotional video:



To be honest, it's just another todo list, and a bare-bones one to be honest: no projects, no categories, no priorities, no GTD states or contexts, and it doesn't even sync with Toodledo or similar!

A waste of money? Quite the opposite. When you first start the app, you have to choose an "avatar" to represent you. Not that it matters, as you can change it later on at any time. Two characters are in-app purchases, if you really want to be an Ent or a Warrior.
Then it's just about creating tasks... err quests. For each quest you can specify:
  • a title
  • a due date
  • the type of quest, chose among: strength, stamina, intellect, social or spirit
  • the "epicness" of the quest, i.e. an amount of eXperience Points from 50 to 300

Quests can be easily rearranged, edited and completed. No alarms or projects, but you won't need them, as you can search through them and you'll want to use this app very frequently anyway.
When you complete a quest, you get the corresponding XPs. When you get a certain amount of XPs you get loot and you level up, just like any respectable fantasy RPG.

This is pretty much it! As I said, if you compare EpicWin to, say, 2Do, it's not much of a comparison, feature-wise. But the whole XP/loot/level-up mechanism can be appealing to RPG junkies or fantasy lovers (approx 40-50% of the iOS users, I dare say), and, more importantly, it just works.

Adding tasks is very straightforward and essential: you only need to write down what you need to do, after all, then just do it.
While the app is still very basic, developers promise frequent updates, and it has a lot of potential really. Here are some ideas:
  • Rename quests in deeds, and allow 1+ deeds to be included in a quest (read: add projects...).
  • Socialize the app. The developers should allow sync and let people create public tasks
  • Better again, allow a common quest pool accessible by all users, and set a fixed amount of XPs for common tasks that everyone could do, e.g. "Wash the dishes" for 50 XP (not 300 like you'd like)
  • Monetize the app by letting users buy things like XP or loot
  • Introduce virtual gold, let users setup quests for other users offering rewards (this could potentially improve the world's productivity dramatically)
  • Add more details, like character classes, guilds, prizes (wash dishes for 7 days in a row)
  • Give out XPs and loot for reviewing the app or promoting it
  • ...
You name it. It's silly, I know, but it's better then spending the whole day farming some sad digital crops!

And my wife loves it: "Honey, could you prepare a quick dinner for 150XP please?"

(download)