About CruiseQuest

A fan project by cruisers, for cruisers.

Why this exists

Cruises are full of little moments most passengers walk right past — the Alchemy Bar menu tucked behind the piano, the captain's portrait on deck 8 mid, a red frog hiding above the bar sign, a pineapple-stamp mural on deck 3 forward. CruiseQuest turns those moments into a game. Hunt them, snap them, rack up tokens, climb a leaderboard shared with every other CruiseQuest player on every Carnival sailing — past, present, or future.

Who built it

CruiseQuest is built by the crew at Thirsty Aztec in San Antonio, Texas — a small bar-tech studio run by Joel Panchevre. We ship a lot of software in our spare hours around running a bar. CruiseQuest is one of those projects: no investors, no ad budget, no affiliate kickbacks — just a scavenger hunt that cruisers actually want to play.

How it works under the hood

Flask + SQLite on a Mac Mini in San Antonio, fronted by a Cloudflare tunnel. Photo verification runs on Anthropic's Claude vision model. Voyage recaps use an ElevenLabs voiceover. Everything you see — leaderboards, medals, Hall of Fame, Diamond mode — is plain HTML rendered server-side. No analytics, no tracking, no pixels. The full privacy policy is here.

Is this official?

No. CruiseQuest is fan-made and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Carnival Corporation & plc. "Carnival," ship names, and related marks are trademarks of Carnival Corporation. We love the ships — we just built a game.

What's next

More sailings as they come online, printable QR-code flyers cabin stewards can drop on Lido deck, dedicated port-day quests, and cruising-duck integration (we see you, Cruising Ducks Facebook crew — 320k strong). If you want something added, email us or find us on the landing page.

Contact

Questions, feedback, press, or takedown requests: [email protected].