VECTOR
Vector is a daily flight map game built from real recorded flights. Five rounds, two questions: where is this flight going to land, and where is this aircraft right now. You answer both by dropping a pin on the map, and you are scored on how far out you were.
Every flight in Vector actually operated. The board is dealt from recorded Flightradar24 tracks, so the path drawn behind an aircraft is the route it really took, bending north over the pole or tracking an airway rather than running straight between two points. That difference is the game: a flat map lies about distance, and the further the flight, the more it lies.
Vector sits alongside FlightQ's map games and daily geography games.
A landing round gives you three things and hides the fourth. The departure airport anchors everything. The flight time tells you roughly how far the aircraft can still get, since a jet covers something close to 800km an hour gate to gate. And the airline is often the strongest clue of the three: a carrier only flies where its network goes, so American out of Charlotte is a US hub, Qatar is Doha, and Miat is Ulaanbaatar. The aircraft is caught between a fifth and half of the way along its route, so there is always more flight ahead of it than the trail behind.
An in-flight round names both airports and tells you how long the aircraft has been up. The lazy answer is to draw the straight line between them and slide along it by the fraction of the flight elapsed. That answer is wrong, and how wrong depends on the route: on a short hop it is out by a couple of hundred kilometres, on a long-haul it can be out by thousands, because a real aircraft follows a great circle and a flat map does not draw one. The reveal shows you exactly how far the straight-line reading would have put you.
Points halve with distance rather than cutting off, so a wide miss still separates a bad guess from a hopeless one. The two questions use different curves: a landing round halves every 600km, an in-flight round every 300km, because naming both airports makes it answerable to far finer precision and one shared curve would hand out near-full marks on every in-flight round. Anything inside 25km is a bullseye and takes the full 200.
Five real flights a day, on one map. Some rounds show an aircraft in the air and ask where it is going to land; others name both airports and ask where the aircraft was mid-flight. Tap the map to place your pin, confirm, and earn points based on how close you were.
Each round is worth up to 200 points and a perfect day is 1000. Points fall away with distance, halving every 600km on a landing round and every 300km on an in-flight round, because naming both airports makes an in-flight round answerable to far finer precision. Anything within 25km counts as a bullseye and takes the full 200.
Yes. Every round is built from a recorded Flightradar24 track of a flight that actually operated, including its real routing, its real timings and the aircraft that flew it. Nothing is simulated.
A landing round gives you the departure airport, the airline and the total flight time, and hides the destination. An in-flight round gives you both airports and how long the aircraft has been flying, and hides the aircraft. They alternate through the day, three of one and two of the other, swapping over each day.
Yes. One board a day, the same five flights for every player, refreshing at midnight Eastern. Past days are playable from the archive.