Following a road

A great road is worth passing on. When someone shares a road in Marque, you can follow it - drive the same route yourself and, at the finish, see how composed your run was against it. And when you simply want to get somewhere, you can point Marque at a destination and let it draw the way.

Drive a shared road

1. Open a road from a friend’s drive, from a road’s board, or from Explore.
2. Arm it before you set off. Marque now knows the route you intend to drive.
3. Record your drive as normal. You don’t have to nail the route exactly. Marque matches your drive to the road.
4. At the finish, a composure card shows how your run went.

Where to?

You don’t need a shared road to be given a route. On the Record screen there’s a Where to? control in the bar at the top: search a place, a street or a house number, pick it, and Marque draws the drive there. Tap it again mid-drive - it becomes Change destination - and it will redraw from wherever you are.

Searching understands three different things and tells them apart: a named place (a town, a pass, a viewpoint), a street, and a full address with a house number. Results are ranked towards where the car actually is, so the Main Street you get is the one you meant.

Being told where to go

Once a road or a destination is armed, the cockpit calls the drive for you, and it stays a glance, never something to operate:

• The turns, before they arrive - the next instruction and the distance to it, with the one after it lined up behind. Now when you’re on top of it.
• How much is left - the distance still to run on the road, or the name of where you’re headed.
• The way to the start - before you reach a shared road, Marque points you at its beginning rather than pretending you’re already on it. Head north-east to the start of the road.

If you come off it

Take a wrong turn and Marque says so - Off the road, with how far away you now are - and then works out a way back, without dropping the follow or ending anything. Carry on and it rejoins you; if you would rather hand it over, Open in your maps app passes the point to the maps app you already use.

Sealed roads, and gravel

Routes stay on sealed roads by default. It’s the right default far more often than not. Gravel and forest tracks look like shortcuts on a map and frequently dead-end in the real world.

If unsealed roads are your thing, Allow unpaved roads is in your settings under Personalization → Roads. It changes the lines Marque draws for you from then on.

It scores composure, not pace

Following a road isn’t a race. The card scores composure - how smooth and controlled your run was - and your elapsed time is shown only as a fact about your own drive, never the thing you’re measured on. Driving harder doesn’t improve the score; if anything it lowers it. There’s more in leaderboards and composure.

Scenic routes

Not sure where to go? Marque can suggest scenic routes near you, good roads worth pointing the car at, anchored around a nearby town. Pick one, and you can follow it just like any shared road.

Putting a road out there yourself

Two ways. When you post a drive, the road it took can be followed by others in turn, reachable by the people you allow, and not pushed at strangers unless your account is set to be discoverable. Or draw the road deliberately, name it, and put it on the map for everyone: drawing a road.