Cantonese Airport: Check In the Passengers

How to play: you are the ground agent at the Experdize Air check-in at Hong Kong, and every passenger speaks Cantonese — this game teaches the language of boarding a flight and flying on a plane. Passengers file through the stanchion ropes to the one desk, and every check comes up on the panel as a question in Cantonese. The terminal stands still while a question is up, so read at your own pace: the level is ten reads, there is no clock to beat, and the record is how long they take you and how many you got right first time. The terminal is built up a level at a time, and every passenger takes their own way through it. At level 1 there is one desk and a roped queue, and every check-in opens with the booking in characters against the romanised passport — 陳大文 against CHAN TAI MAN. Approve a match, turn a mismatch away; the mismatches are near misses built from the confusions a Chinese name really suffers (a homophone, a look-alike, or a tone the passport cannot show), so the read is the name. Then they ask for a seat — 窗口位coeng1 hau2 wai2 the window, 走廊位zau2 long4 wai2 the aisle, 都得 either — and answering is picking what they said. Level 2 opens the self check-in kiosks by the doors: some passengers print a boarding pass and pick their seat there, some checked in online and walk straight in. Level 3 brings checked bags and the bag drop — the kiosk prints the bag tag, the scale reads the weight in Chinese numerals against 限二十三公斤 (公斤 is the kilo; a Hong Kong 斤 is 604.8g), and an overweight case is repacked before it goes down the belt, because only a carry-on goes past the desk. Somebody who forgot the kiosk is sent back for a tag. Level 4 turns the body scanner on — 刀 and 打火機 are confiscated, 鑰匙 and 散紙 are legal — and level 5 the X-ray, where 一樽水 and 噴霧罐 do not fly. Level 6 opens the information booth: people ask the way — 保安檢查喺邊度？, 行李認領處喺邊度？ — and you tell them where it is; a few are not flying at all and only want arrivals. Level 7 adds the gate podium, where passengers ask 幾號閘口 and you read the departures board — 飛往廣州, 飛往首爾 — for 二號閘口, 十二號閘口 or 三十二號閘口. From level 8 the board shows each flight's status — 準時, 延誤, 取消, 開始登機, 最後召集 — and passengers ask the booth what it says: a cancellation sends them home, a delay to the seats, a final call has them hurrying. Trolleys, seats, signs, a café and flight screens fill the hall on the way. Wrong answers are taken or answered back, never refused — they cost the streak or a fine, a walk the wrong way or a protest, and the read settles as wrong. The Difficulty row on the setup card decides how much help is written under each line: Beginner adds jyutping and English, Intermediate jyutping alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. What is spoken out loud is always the Cantonese.