| Guess | Country | Continent | Elevation | Runways | Longest runway |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
How to play Airport-dle
Airport-dle gives you six guesses at one airport out of 1,076. The clue is not a photograph. It is the airport's runway layout drawn as bare lines, and it starts with only the longest runway.
You get 6 guesses. Each one is scored against 5 columns - Country, Continent, Elevation, Runways and Longest runway - and the scoring is the whole game: you are narrowing a field rather than naming it cold.
Country and Continent are exact or nothing: the cell turns green when your guess holds the same value as the answer, and stays blank when it does not. Elevation is a band, and it is scored on how far apart the bands sit: the same band is green, one band either way is yellow, and further away is blank. Runways and Longest runway are numbers, and an arrow points from your guess towards the answer, so a wrong number still tells you which way to go. Longest runway in ft.
A column the source leaves blank is marked as having no data rather than scored. It cannot come back green for anyone, on any guess, which means an unrecorded value is never a lucky hit - and the gap itself is a fact about the record, so the grid shows it instead of hiding it.
The layout, drawn largest runway first
At the start you see a single stroke: the longest runway at its true orientation, scaled to the frame so its actual length gives nothing away. Each wrong guess adds the next-longest runway on the airports that have one, and about two thirds of the pool is single-runway, so on those days the drawing is one line and stays that way. Where more runways appear, the drawing keeps true relative lengths and positions, except at the handful of fields whose source rows carry no runway end coordinates.
The drawing carries geometry and nothing else. There is no name on it, no code, no text of any kind, which is why it can be shown before you have guessed anything.
What the five columns tell you
Every guess is scored against Country, Continent, Elevation, Runways and Longest runway. Country, Continent and Elevation either match the answer or they do not. Elevation is a band rather than a number, so a match puts the airport in a broad altitude class rather than pinning it.
Runways and Longest runway are numeric and show an arrow pointing the way the answer lies from your guess. Those two columns narrow things fast once you have a continent.
Where the data comes from
The dataset is OurAirports, CC0 1.0 public domain. The build keeps only airports typed as large with scheduled service and at least one runway carrying a heading, which leaves the 1,076 airports in the pool. The runway drawings are made from the same public-domain runway geometry.
The calendar runs one airport a day for 1,076 days. When you finish, the reveal names the airport, gives its codes, links to a map, and shows an English Wikipedia summary excerpt under CC BY-SA 4.0.
After the puzzle
Finishing unlocks a short set of bonus questions, and how many you get depends on what the data supports that day. They ask which of two airports sits higher, which is the biggest airport in a named country, which airport serves a named city, and which airport is a hub for a named airline.
They are not gated behind each other and getting one wrong does not close the next, because the point of them is the fact rather than the score.
Where the data comes from
Airport-dle is built on one openly licensed dataset, frozen into the game before it goes out. The licence is named next to each one above, and the same list, with the per-record detail, is on the Airport-dle attribution page.
The writing you get on the reveal is english Wikipedia summary excerpt, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is quoted or generated from the source, never written by a language model while you play, and it carries its own credit and licence line wherever it appears.
The pool holds 1,076 entries and the calendar already runs 1,076 days, one answer a day, no repeats. That sequence was built offline before release and ships inside the game, so it is the same for everyone and nobody can read tomorrow out of the page. The day rolls over at midnight UTC.
Nothing is lost when a day ends. Every puzzle that has already run stays playable in the archive, and its answer, with the same reading you would have got by finishing it, is published the day after it ran.
Every past answer · Sources and licences in full · Airport-dle on Gamecove
Questions
- Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
- Yes. One airport a day, identical for every player, changing at midnight UTC. The bonus questions are generated from the puzzle number, so those match too.
- Do I need an account?
- No. There is nothing to sign up for. Streaks and stats are kept in your browser's local storage rather than on a server.
- Is the runway drawing to scale?
- Angles and relative lengths are true, so the shape of the field is honest. Absolute size is deliberately hidden: the drawing is scaled to its frame, so a long runway and a short one look the same length.