The rules
Name the country under the ring.
Flyover shows the same place to everyone each day, drawn in a clean atlas style with every label removed. You start close enough to see individual roads and end high enough to see a continent - and the only thing the game tells you between those two points is which way to look.
- One patch a day. Every day Flyover shows one real place through an airplane window. You win by naming the country under the ring at the centre.
- Start close, with no labels. View one is a tight crop. Coastlines, rivers, lakes, islands, roads and borders are all you get - every place name is stripped out.
- Misses climb higher. A wrong guess pulls the window back and levels the view off, roughly tripling the ground on screen and bringing in more recognisable geography.
- Arrows give direction only. Each guess row shows where the answer lies from the country you named. Never how far - that is what the window is for.
- Six windows, then it is over. Fewer is better: the view you solved it on IS the score. Solve it at view one and that is a perfect day.
A worked example
View one is a maze of canals between long thin islands and a lagoon. You guess Norway - fjords were the instinct. Miss: the arrow points south, and the window pulls back to show a coastline running north-west.
You try Portugal, far to the west, so the second arrow crosses the first: it points east. Two arrows have now boxed you into the central Mediterranean, and view three shows an unmistakable shape starting to form. You name Italy and the country traces itself in ink. Three windows.
Scoring
The window you solved it on is the score.
No points and no multipliers. Solve it at the first window and that is a perfect day; every miss costs you one and widens the view. Six windows is the whole game - miss the sixth and the answer is revealed with the country traced on the map.
Strategy
Six habits of low window counts.
- Read the water first. A coastline shape is the strongest single clue on the map - fjords, barrier islands, river deltas and lagoons each belong to a short list of places.
- Open somewhere useful. If nothing looks familiar, spend view one on a guess that produces an informative arrow rather than one you believe in.
- Cross two arrows. One narrows the world to a line; a second from a country far from the first narrows it to a region. Pick your second guess to be nowhere near your first.
- Use the road pattern. Street grids, ring roads and rural field shapes differ enormously between continents - a dense orthogonal grid is not the same signature as a medieval tangle.
- Watch the latitude lines. The graticule appears as you climb, and how far apart the lines sit tells you roughly how far from the equator you are.
- Let the last views do the work. By view five you are looking at a continental shape, so do not burn early guesses on wild ones - bank two good arrows instead.
Questions
Flyover FAQ.
How many guesses do I get in Flyover?
Six. The first view is a tight close-up about 26km across. Every wrong guess climbs higher, so the window pulls back and roughly triples the ground you can see, ending on a continental view.
What do the arrows mean?
Each wrong guess shows an arrow pointing from the country you named toward the hidden patch. It is a direction only - never a distance. Two arrows narrow the world to a region, but they cannot finish the job on their own: the view out the window is what tells you how far along that line you are.
Do I need to name the exact place?
No. You only name the country containing the ringed point at the centre of the window. The label under the result - the fjord, the strait, the delta - is flavour, not the answer.
How is the score calculated?
Your score is the view you solved it on, so naming the country at the first window is a perfect run. There are no points or multipliers - the window number IS the result.
Is there one Flyover per day?
Yes. Everyone in the world gets the same patch each day, and it refreshes at midnight Eastern. Past days are playable from the archive.
What maps does Flyover use?
Map data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors, redrawn in FlightQ's atlas style with every place name removed. Terrain and the shaded relief come from Mapzen elevation tiles, which is also where the sea-floor depth comes from.
Is Flyover free?
Yes. Free in the browser, no account needed. Your guesses and results are saved on your device, so you can close the tab mid-round and come back to it.