Airport Code Game is a free daily geography game with one rule: you are shown a 3-letter airport code, and you have to work out which airport it belongs to. Guess an airport, and every miss tells you how far away you are and which direction to head, so the clues close in on the answer.

It is the opposite of the usual airport Wordle. You are not spelling the code letter by letter, you are placing it on the map. LAX, GRU, DXB, SIN: some you will know at a glance, others you triangulate from the distance and direction hints until the country gives it away.

There is a new five-code board every day for everyone in the world, plus an endless streak mode for when you want to keep playing. No sign-up and no app to install, it runs right here in your browser on your phone or laptop.

Play Airport Code Game

How to play

Read the 3-letter IATA code shown at the top of the board.
Type an airport by city, name or code and pick it from the list to lock in a guess.
Every wrong guess shows the distance, a direction arrow and a proximity percentage pointing toward the mystery airport.
Miss a few and the game reveals the continent, then the country, to keep lesser-known codes fair.
Solve the code and move to the next one. Finish all five to score your daily board out of 5,000 and share the result.

Game modes

Daily Departure Board gives you five airport codes, the same five for every player that day. You get four guesses per code and score more for solving in fewer tries. Land all five for a perfect boarding and share your spoiler-free emoji scorecard.

Endless Runway is the keep-playing mode: one famous code after another, six guesses each, three lives. Solve codes to build your streak and see how long you can stay on the runway before you run out of lives.

The geography behind airport codes

A three-letter IATA code is the shorthand the airline industry uses for every airport with scheduled flights. Plenty are easy (MAD for Madrid, SIN for Singapore), but many are not: ORD is Chicago O’Hare (after its old name, Orchard Field) and CDG is Paris (after Charles de Gaulle). That gap between the code and the place is exactly what makes them fun to guess.

Because every airport sits at a real latitude and longitude, a wrong guess can tell you something useful: the great-circle distance to the mystery airport and the compass direction toward it. Guess a hub on the wrong continent and the arrow swings you right across the map; guess a neighbour and the distance drops fast.

The answer codes are drawn from the world’s most recognizable hubs, so a little travel knowledge and a feel for the map go a long way.

Frequently asked questions

Is it the same codes for everyone today?

Yes. The daily board is seeded from the UTC date, so every player worldwide gets the same five airport codes each day. The board resets at midnight UTC, which is what makes comparing scorecards fair.

Why don’t airport codes match the city name?

Many do, but IATA codes were assigned across more than a century of aviation. Some come from an airport’s old name, a nearby landmark or a namesake, so ORD, CDG, MCO and LED look nothing like their cities. Working out that link is half the game.

Which airports can be the answer?

The mystery codes come from a curated set of the world’s famous international hubs, so every daily answer is a recognizable airport. You can still guess from thousands of airports worldwide, so a regional field near the target works as a stepping stone toward it.

What data does the game use?

Airport names, cities and coordinates come from OurAirports open data (public domain). The map uses Natural Earth via world-atlas, and country flags come from the flag-icons project (public domain). Everything is bundled into the game, so nothing about you is sent anywhere.