THE MAP

An airport guessing game with three thousand possible answers

The answer to every round of this airport guessing game is one of roughly three thousand airports: every large and medium field with scheduled service, worldwide. They are all on the map, all clickable, and only one of them is where the plane in front of you is going.

Why the airport list is the difficulty curve

A guessing game with ten answers is trivia. A guessing game with three thousand is geography. The size of the answer space is what forces you to reason from evidence rather than recall, because there is no shortlist to work through.

It also means the map is worth reading on its own. Airports cluster where people are, and the clusters have shapes. Europe is a dense mesh where a fifty-kilometre error is a different country. The Pacific is enormous gaps with single points in them, where being on the right island is the whole game.

Distance scoring makes a near miss meaningful

Pin the exact airport and take 5,000 points. Miss by forty kilometres and take most of it. Miss by four thousand and take a little. The curve is steep near zero and flattens out, so precision is rewarded hard while a reasoned guess in the right region still banks something.

It also means the reveal is informative rather than binary. Watching the route draw itself from your pin to the real airport shows you exactly which part of your reasoning was wrong.

Airports you visit get logged

Every airport you correctly reach gets stamped into the logbook, and the count feeds badges like Globetrotter and Stamp Collector. The stats page breaks your record down by region, so the gaps in your map become visible.

Charters let you attack those gaps directly by restricting the pool to one continent at a time.

Which airports are actually in play

The list comes from the OurAirports dataset and is filtered to large and medium airports with scheduled commercial service. Heliports, private strips and disused fields are excluded, because an answer nobody could reasonably reach is not a puzzle, it is a trick.

That filter also shapes the difficulty in a useful way. Every airport on the map is somewhere an airliner genuinely flies, so the shortlist you build in your head is always made of real candidates rather than dots that happen to be nearby.

Airport density varies enormously and the game leans into it. Guessing inside the American midwest means separating a dozen fields inside three hundred kilometres. Guessing in the middle of the Pacific means committing to one island and living with it.