January 2023 GOTM Winners
Is it just us, or has January just flown by? We even started off quite slow in the first week, with just the usual reveal of this year’s Monthly Streak Bouncers, the Garden Hedges, and the January MunzPak contents which include the latest Celtic Zodiac. A little later in the week we put out our first Greeting Card Catalog, which we are shooting to do at the start of every month.
The next week we launched a new limited-time credit, the HeartBeatz! We also created a separate layer for Greeting Cards, and celebrated the 6th installment of Flat Day the 13th.
The week after that, we released the B00mBox Mech in the HeartBeatz Redeem Store section, launched Operation: Swatch Out! and added more WhoDuckIt suspects to the mix.
Just this week, we announced our update to blast captures, and also released new Fitness skins for select Myths. We’ve still got just under a week left in January, so make sure to keep an eye out for our usual end-of-month posts!
We are now happy to announce the winners of the January Gardens of the Month (GOTM)! The badges will be awarded by early February, but we couldn’t wait to share the winners we’ve chosen!
January GOTM
We wanted to start this year off with two big and beautiful cool-toned gardens that came on our radar late last year. Remember that all winning GOTM organizers and all players who deployed in the winning gardens will be awarded special badges for their contribution to growing the map. This month we’re happy to award the Caretta Sea Turtle garden, designed by tlmeadowlark, and the Adventure Garden For Bluestreek, designed by Sanli and roughdraft, as our winning January GOTM! The gardens appear as follows:
Caretta Sea Turtle by tlmeadowlark in Montgomery, AL
The massive size of this garden alone is already quite an accomplishment — it can be difficult for larger gardens to reach completion as there are so many beautiful designs out there for players to contribute towards!
Here’s a note from a player who nominated this garden:
The Caretta sea turtle garden in Montgomery, Alabama USA is one of the better designed gardens I have seen in all the years since gardens began. The designer, tlmeadowlark, and the garden deserve to be recognized for the artistry and subject matter.
There is great use of different types of munzees to bring the threatened Loggerhead (Caretta caretta) sea turtle to life in a munzee garden while being able to show the details of the actual turtle’s shell fairly well. That is not easy task to do in a munzee garden. Additionally, the designer worked quite hard to get this large garden completely deployed in time for National Sea Turtle day.
It would be especially nice if this garden can be recognized during the Loggerhead’s Alabama nesting period of April through August.
Thank you for your consideration.
This garden has been so enthusiastically recommended to us by many players, both via the Google Form and in-person. But even if only 1 player had told us about it, we knew we would choose it as the GOTM at some point. It was just a matter of finding the right partner, which you’ll see below, and then afterwards, the right month to showcase them both.
Adventure Garden For Bluestreek by Sanli and roughdraft in Vancouver, BC, Canada
The beautiful sky in this garden reminds us of the iconic Starry Night painting, but the galleon in the center promises an adventure of the swashbuckling variety! The combination is fresh and eye-catching!
Here’s a note from the player who nominated this garden:
Back in 2018, one of our local players, bluestreek, here in Metro Vancouver, BC, Canada was diagnosed with cancer. A garden aptly named “Adventure Garden For Bluestreek” was created with Sanna Lindgren’s (Sanli) design of a ship on a nighttime adventure to honour his journey ahead.
Despite his severe illness, he has continued to be a pioneer in the local Munzee community, inspiring his community to get out there and Munzee.
I want to encourage folks to deploy virtuals with messages of encouragement not only to bluestreek, but to anyone who might need one.
While we are sad to hear about bluestreek’s cancer diagnosis, we appreciate the story behind this garden. Not every player has a garden designed and deployed in his honor, so we hope that bluestreek knows the impact he has had on the Munzee community. Our thoughts are with bluestreek now.
All players who deployed in the respective winning gardens will receive the following special badges:
Rules for GOTM nominations:
- Garden must feature non-licensed character designs.
- The garden must feature a Garden Places Pin.
- The garden must be built using a publicly available spreadsheet which we will ask to be locked after being 100% deployed.
- We’re asking for ongoing nominations and we will release the winners throughout the year.
Based on your feedback, we’ve created a Google Form where you can submit GOTM nominations — here’s the link: https://forms.gle/SjUQeRxdi5FT81pCA
We’ll still check the iloveyou@munzee.com inbox for stragglers, but please try to send your submissions to this new Google Form instead. Keep in mind that we take all former nominations into consideration for upcoming months. Just be sure your garden follows the nomination rules in order to be considered eligible!
If you need help deploying in a Virtual Garden, you can check out this step-by-step tutorial that will making deploying in a garden easy no matter how long you’ve been playing. To fill in the gardens, make sure to stock up on Virtuals and Color Credits from the Freeze Tag Online Store.
Munzee on!
P.S. Are you looking for POTM requirements? Remember that in 2020, we announced that we were holding off on POTM for now as we develop a new way to highlight our unique player base!
