Travel log
Your saved trips, and your Passport: the places you’ve been and want to go, with a stamp for each game you’ve seen.
Saved trips
A saved trip keeps the settings that produced it, not just the route. "View" shows the route exactly as you saved it. "Re-run with fresh data" searches again with today's schedules, so it can come back different.
to save trips and see them here.
No saved trips yet. Plan a route, then use "Save this trip" under your results.
Passport
Your personal travel record. Mark the cities, teams and venues you've already been to, and the ones you still want to see. The map fills in the states, and the Canadian provinces along the border, that you've covered. Pick the goal New states or provinces and GameDetour leans toward places you haven't been; pick My bucket list and the places you want to go are added to Must include for you.
Loading the map.
Stamps
Want to go
Been there
Saved to this browser only — create an account to keep it for good.
Clears the form choices, favorite teams, want-to-go list and map states this browser remembers. Places you’ve marked as visited, your account and your saved trips stay.
Your account
Signed in as .
How it works
Questions people ask, in plain answers. Tap a question to open it.
The basics
What does GameDetour do?
What makes a trip possible
These are rules, not preferences. If a drive breaks one of them, that combination of games is dropped, however good it looks otherwise.
How are drive times worked out?
How early do I have to arrive?
What if a game ends late and the next drive is long?
What if a drive is longer than my daily limit?
Can I see a game on my last day?
Is there a limit on how far it will go?
What about a game with no announced time?
How the best route is picked
Once a set of games is possible, it competes with every other possible set.
Does the order of the games matter?
How does GameDetour choose between trips that work?
Games you must include come first. After that, games that match your Goal count the most, then your favorite teams’ games, then everything else. Of all the trips that work, the one with the highest total wins; with no Goal chosen, that simply means the most games.
Show the numbers
Each kind of game gets a weight: how many times more it counts than an ordinary game.
For all practical purposes, a requirement. If it can possibly fit, it gets fit, even if the route looks less tidy. A city or venue you add needs one game; once it has one, its other games count like any other.
Your Goal (a league or two, your favorite teams, or states you haven’t been to) makes matching games count five times as much as an ordinary one. It leans the trip toward them without removing the rest.
Counts double in every search, so it wins out over an ordinary game when GameDetour has to choose. A thumb on the scale, not a demand. It stacks with your Goal.
The baseline. Every real game you can make it to counts toward a better trip, and more of them is what GameDetour maximizes by default.
What does Goal do?
What does Must include do?
What does Trip style do?
Dates, places and leagues
Where do I start and end?
What does “Flexible dates” do?
Can I set exact times?
What is Quick start?
Which leagues are included?
Customize your trip
Can I limit how many games?
Can I limit how much I drive?
What does “First game near my starting location” do?
What do the game filters do?
Can the same team show up twice?
Your defaults, Passport and account
What are Your defaults?
How do favorite teams and avoid lists work?
What is the Passport?
Do I need an account?
Privacy Policy
Last updated
The short version
GameDetour helps you plan road trips around live sporting events. You can use it without an account. If you make one, we store a username, a scrambled version of your password, and whatever you choose to save, such as settings and trips. We never ask for your email address, your real name, or payment details.
This policy explains what we collect, why, who else touches it, and how to delete it. We are an independent project based in the United States, and this page is written in plain language on purpose.
What we collect
If you create an account:
- Your username, a scrambled (hashed) version of your password, and when the account was made. We cannot read your password.
- What you save while signed in: your settings (such as your home city, leagues and filters), places you have been, and saved trips, so they follow you between devices.
Whether or not you have an account:
- Where you start from. When you type a starting place, we look it up to plan the route and keep the result in a shared list so later searches are faster. That list has no usernames or internet addresses in it, and places visitors type are deleted after 30 days.
- Simple usage records. For each search we record the choices made (such as leagues and trip goal), the trip length, the states it passes through, the starting state, whether a route was found, how long the search took, why it failed if it did, which venues and teams the route visits, and the time. We also note when someone downloads a calendar file, prints a route, copies a share link, opens a saved trip, or picks light or dark theme. These are not attached to your username or internet address. We keep them without an end date because they do not identify you.
- Visit counts. We count visitors and page views so we know how the site is used. To count each visitor once a day, we make a one-way scrambled code from your internet address and browser, mixed with the day, and delete it the next day. We cannot turn it back into either, and tomorrow's code for you is unrelated to today's. What we keep are totals only: visitors and page views per day, which part of the site was opened, whether the browser is new or returning, whether it is a phone, tablet or desktop, and the name of the website that linked you here (never the full address, and never what you searched for). Known bots are not counted.
- Contact messages. If you use the Contact page, we store your message, the topic you choose, the optional line telling us how to reach you, and the time you sent it. We do not store your username with it.
- Scrambled visitor codes. To stop spam and abuse, we keep one-way scrambled codes made from your internet address (and, for sign-in, from the username you try), with a count and a time. We cannot turn them back into the original. They are deleted after about a day. While the site is running, our server also holds your internet address in its memory for up to an hour to count requests; it is never saved and is erased when the server restarts.
- Records at our hosts. The app itself keeps no log of who visited, only the totals described above, but our hosting provider and the network in front of it process every request and may keep their own logs, which can include your internet address and browser type.
What we do not collect: your email address, your real name, or payment information. We suggest typing a city, not a full street address, as your starting place.
How we use it
- To plan your trips and show you game schedules and drive times.
- To keep your account, settings and saved trips working across devices.
- To keep the site fast, fair and safe, for example by limiting how many searches one visitor can run at once.
- To read and answer messages you send us, and to fix mistakes in venue and team information.
- To understand which features people use, how fast searches are, and where they fail, so we know what to improve.
- To pay for the site, with ads and ticket-link commissions once they start.
We do not sell your information, and we do not use it to build advertising profiles. The companies behind the ads and links described below work under their own policies.
Who else handles your information
- Hosting and network. The site runs on Render in the United States, with Cloudflare in front of it. They see requests, including your internet address, and may log them.
- Route services. When a starting place isn't already in our list, we send that text to OpenRouteService to find its location. If OpenRouteService can't answer, we may send the same text to Photon, a free lookup service run by Komoot, instead. To draw roads and work out drive times, we send place coordinates to OpenRouteService and to a public OSRM server. They see our server's address, not yours and not your username. They have their own policies.
- Game schedules. We ask ESPN for the schedule for a league and date. Nothing about you is sent.
- Shared trip links. If you share a saved trip, anyone with the link sees the trip, including its starting place and the display name on your account. Links stop working after 30 days, or when you delete the trip or your account. A preview picture of the trip is kept only while its link works.
- Links out. The site links to our X account and to ticket sellers (see Ads and ticket links). They learn of your visit only if you click.
Ads and ticket links
GameDetour is free to use. We plan to pay for it with ads and ticket links, and this is what that means for you.
- Ads. The site will show ads from Google. Google and its partners may use cookies and similar tools to show and measure ads, including ads based on your visits to this and other websites. You can manage or turn off personalized ads in Google's ad settings, and read how Google uses information from sites like this one on its partner-sites page.
- Ticket links. Links to buy tickets go to outside ticket sellers. Some of them will go through affiliate networks, such as Impact, which will use cookies or similar tools to record that a click came from GameDetour. These companies have their own privacy policies.
- Commission. Once these links are set up, we may earn a commission if you buy through one, at no extra cost to you.
Cookies and browser storage
GameDetour itself does not set cookies and loads no outside fonts or analytics (it counts its own visits, as described above). Pages that show ads will load Google's ad code, and ticket links can lead to sites that set cookies; see Ads and ticket links above. The site also stores some things in your browser so it works: your settings (home city, leagues and filters) and the venues, cities and teams you have visited (kept even if you are signed out), your theme, a yes/no mark that this browser has been here before (used only to tell new visitors from returning ones), and, if you are signed in, a sign-in token and your display name. The token lasts 30 days. You can clear all of this in your browser settings, and signing out removes the token.
How long we keep it, and deleting your account
- Your account and what you saved stay until you delete your account. You can delete it yourself with your password. That removes your username, settings, travel history and saved trips, and shared links stop working at once.
- Contact messages are deleted automatically after 12 months.
- Starting-place list deletes places visitors type after 30 days.
- Scrambled visitor codes (used to limit spam and to count each visitor once a day) are deleted after about a day.
- Usage records and visit totals do not identify you, so they are kept without an end date.
- Our hosts' logs are kept under their own schedules.
Backups kept by our hosting provider may hold information we have deleted for a short time before they age out.
No email means no password recovery
Because we do not store an email address, we cannot send you a password reset, and we cannot verify that someone asking for a reset is really you. If you forget your password, the account and its saved trips cannot be recovered. We suggest using a password manager. You can change your password while you are signed in.
Children
GameDetour is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us through the Contact page and we will delete it.
Security
Passwords are stored only in scrambled form, the site is served over an encrypted connection, and access to our own admin tools needs a second sign-in step. No online service can promise perfect security, so please use a unique password.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect or how we use it, we will update this page and its date before the change takes effect. Using the site after an update means you accept the updated policy.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or requests to delete a message you sent, go through the Contact page on gamedetour.com.
Contact
Found a wrong stadium, a missing game, or something that doesn't work? Tell us here. We read every message.
We save your message, the topic you pick, the line below if you fill it in, and the time you sent it. Nothing else about you is saved with it. We can't send email from this page, so if you'd like an answer, tell us how to reach you.
Live example · a real route
Your next trip, already on the map.
Pick where you’re starting and when you can go. GameDetour finds the pro and college games you can reach, in a route you could actually drive.
From the first mile to the last. No spreadsheet.
Every stop from the map above, in driving order — full matchups and game times for each one.
Your route
Drive times are estimates and don’t account for traffic.
As scheduled at the time of this search — a league between seasons, or a playoff picture not yet set, simply won’t have games here yet.
Pro and college leagues, checked at once — then put on the map.
Keep what you plan.
An account saves your trips and remembers your preferences. Nothing more. There’s no email, so keep your password safe.