While The New York Times crossword has been a staple in many households for decades, plenty of alternative games have captured our attention in recent years.
Sporcle. GeoGuessr. Wordle.
And if you consider yourself an AV geek and a geography nerd, we think you might just want to take a look at FlightQ.
First launched in March, the flight and geography platform has numerous games aimed at those who love to travel.
Like Wordle, which took the world by storm in 2021, some of the games have puzzles that are released daily, whereas others you can play continuously.
Here are some of our favourites.
SkyQ
FlightQ’s first game, there are three SkyQ levels to play daily – easy, medium and hard – with five guesses allowed for each.
The easy game uses your nearest airport as the base, and for the first guess, you’ll be given the flight duration and aircraft used.
Failing that, you’ll be given the type of flight (i.e., domestic or international), then the direction, then the airline, and finally, the flight path.
After each guess, you’ll be told if either of your airports are correct and whether they’re in the correct position in terms of departure or arrival, and if they’re wrong, the feedback will show the distance to and direction of the right spots.
The medium game uses US-connected routes, while the hard game uses non-US routes.
TransitQ
One for train enthusiasts, TransitQ invites you to guess which city an unlabelled subway line belongs to.
There is only one level of difficulty, and you’ll initially be told the number of stations, how long it takes to go from one end to the other, and shown the shape and colour of the line.
Failed guesses give you the real station spacing, the interchanges and other line colours, the city outline, the length of the line, when the line opened, and the district labels and station names.
You’ll also be given the distance and direction from the correct answer after each guess.
CityQ
For this game, you are asked to fill in a 3×3 grid with different row and column categories.
For example, in yesterday’s game, you were asked to guess a capital city where the residents speak either Russian, Polish or Ukrainian, as well as a city on a major river where the population is between 50,000 and 100,000.
You win this one based on the rarity of the correct guesses submitted.
PassportQ
For this one, you have to guess the city based on the temperature high for the day and the population.
Each failed guess reveals the elevation, the local time, the landscape type and the top airlines. Again, you also get the distance and direction from the correct city for each guess.
Strata
An unknown city has been turned into a 3D map for this game, which initially opens with just the topography from above.
After a failed guess, you’ll get the weather, then the bodies of water in the city, then the road layout, then the buildings. You guessed it: You also get the distance and direction of the right pick.
There are two options for this one, US and Canada or worldwide.