AirportQ

AirportQ hides one airport and shows you its route map instead. Not a photo, not a runway diagram: a scatter of dots on a world map marking places you can fly to nonstop from the mystery hub. It starts brutally sparse, five destinations out of a network that might run to two hundred or more, and you have to work out which airport sits at the centre of that pattern. A cluster of tiny domestic dots reads completely differently from a spread of transatlantic and Gulf routes, and learning to tell those shapes apart is the entire game.

1. Study the dots you are given. Five destinations is not much, but their spread already tells you a continent and often a hemisphere.
2. Type a guess into the field. It accepts a city name, an airport name, an IATA code or an ICAO code, and the dropdown disambiguates cities with more than one airport so you can pick the right one.
3. Read the compass bearing on a miss. Each wrong guess is logged with an arrow and a bearing such as ESE or WNW, pointing from the airport you named toward the one you are hunting.
4. Collect the five new destinations every miss unlocks, and re-read the shape. Each batch sharpens the network's silhouette.
5. Land it before the map runs out. There is no guess counter ticking down, but the reveal is the clock: once every destination is on screen the puzzle has told you everything.

Most geography dailies test whether you can recognise a shape. AirportQ tests whether you understand how air travel is actually organised, which is a far stranger and more satisfying kind of knowledge. You start seeing that a hub's personality is written in its route list: the wall of three-letter regional codes that means a domestic megahub, the thin fan of long-hauls that means a connecting airport in the Gulf, the handful of seasonal leisure routes that means somewhere smaller than it looks. The bearing-based feedback is a smart choice too, since withholding distance keeps the map doing the heavy lifting. And the end-of-round breakdown, with its longest route and its rarest destination that shows up in exactly one network in the whole game, is the sort of detail that makes you click Past days.

Two channels, and they work together. The verdict line simply says Miss or Hit. The useful part is the guess row, which stamps your guess with a compass bearing and an arrow rotated to the exact heading of the hidden airport. Guess Denver and get ESE, guess Frankfurt and get WNW, and you have triangulated a rough position without a single distance figure ever being shown. Meanwhile the counter at the top climbs in steps of five, so the map itself is the second feedback loop. Solve it and the game reports how many destinations it took, awards points accordingly, then unpacks the full network with three stats: the biggest hub cluster by country, the single longest route with its distance, and the rarest destination in the whole game measured by how many other AirportQ networks it appears in.

Daily airport

One hidden airport per day, numbered by day count and shared by everyone, with a share card and a link back through past days.

• Do not open with a guess you believe. Open with two far-apart hubs on purpose, because two bearings cross and a crossing is a location. One bearing on its own is nearly worthless.
• Count the dots before you name anything. The destinations total is on screen from the start, and a network of two hundred plus routes rules out every regional field immediately.
• Learn to read the tail of the network, not the body. Almost every big hub serves the obvious capitals; it is the odd single long-haul, or a dense pocket of tiny regional codes, that fingerprints one specific airport.
• When you have a country, remember the dropdown lists every airport in a city separately. Naming the right city but the wrong field still scores a miss, so check the code before you commit.
• Points reward restraint. Since each miss both reveals more map and costs you score, it is worth pausing on a sparse map rather than machine-gunning guesses to force the reveal.