Egyptian Taxi: Take the Fare

How to play: you are driving a cab across downtown Cairo — Tahrir and the Egyptian Museum, قصر النيل down to the Corniche. The roads, their names, the buildings and the places all come from OpenStreetMap, and Cairo maps every one of them twice, so the street signs on your map are the real ones in Arabic. The cab drives itself: it follows the satnav, stops at lights and signs, and pulls over at the green ring to pick your fare up. Your whole job is the Egyptian.

Three questions, and the cab moves when you answer them.

1 · Where do they want to go? They say it in Egyptian — أنا رايح على المسجد يا معلم. — and a row of four appears. Pick the kind of place they asked for and the cab is routed there. Get it wrong and you really do drive them to a church; they tell you so when you arrive, and you take them on to the right place. Nothing is refused, and the only thing a wrong answer costs is the driving — and either way you are shown the word you should have picked. The nine words are فندق, مسجد, كنيسة, مستشفى, متحف, حديقة, سينما and their siblings.

⚠ There is nothing in front of the noun at all, which makes this the hardest of the three cabs rather than the easiest: French glues à onto an article three ways and Spanish contracts with el, and Egyptian gives you no little word to lean on. What carries the read is the PAIRS. مسجد is a mosque and كنيسة is a church — one OSM kind, two words, and Cairo has both in quantity in the same streets, five mosques to every church on this square.

2 · Which way did the satnav say to turn? The banner says بعد خمسين متر دوس شمال. — the cab stops, and a row of four appears: دوس شمال left, دوس يمين right, على طول straight on or لف turn around. Pick the one the instruction said and the cab makes that turn. Pick wrong and the cab really does turn the wrong way, which costs you time and nothing else — the route simply works its way back — and the satnav tells you which word it actually said.

⚠ The distance comes FIRST, which neither sibling cab does: French says Tournez à gauche dans cinquante mètres and Spanish Gire a la izquierda en cincuenta metros, and Egyptian puts the condition in front — so you read the number before you know what it is for. بعد is the word that carries it: "after", i.e. in another fifty metres.

3 · What does the meter come to? At the kerb they ask بكام يا معلم؟ and the driver reads the meter — تمام، خمسة وأربعين جنيه. — written on the row. You pick the fare off the row of four to match it — and this is where Egyptian changes what a digit sounds like rather than what it looks like. The teens are words of their own — حداشر, اتناشر, تلاتاشر — that stop dead at عشرين, and the tens are single words — عشرين, تلاتين, أربعين — none of which a learner who has counted واحد اتنين تلاتة can predict. The fare band is built so you meet both: about 11–55 جنيه, every level.

⚠ Those are the wrong answers you are offered, and they are in every level: the irregular teens and the tens live in one band of numbers, so the fares do not have to climb to reach them — the band is priced to hold them from the first shift. You are paid what you say, never more than the meter, and a wrong figure costs the tip and your streak — and the figure you should have read is shown beside the one you picked.

Get one wrong and you are told the answer. Whichever of the three rows it was, what you picked and what was right come up side by side — the characters, the respell and the English, at every difficulty, because an answer you still cannot read is not an answer. The consequence stands: the cab still turns the way you said and still drives where you sent it. You simply also find out what the word was.

There is no clock and you cannot lose. A level is ten reads — five fares, a destination and a meter each — and it ends the moment you answer the last one. The turn questions are the steering and are not part of that ten. While a question is up the whole city stands still: nobody drives, nobody walks, and nothing is waiting on you. What is recorded is your time and how many you read right. Press R, or the button, to hear anything again — it is free and there is no limit.

You can stop the city yourself. Press P, or the button on the meter, and everything holds exactly where it is — the cab, the traffic, the lights, the instruction's fade and both speech bubbles — so you can read every word on the screen at your own pace and drive on when you are ready. Your time is the one thing that keeps counting, because it is what gets recorded.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The Level row is where on the Taxi lesson tonight's shift sits — the same levels the course wall is divided into, numbered the same way. A level's shift is driven on the streets the lesson level has reached: the lesson's early levels open the gentler streets, and from level three the instruction fades a few seconds after it is said, so you have to read it rather than stare at it. Past the sim's own fifth rung the streets hold at their fullest while the lesson keeps going. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the respell and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the respell alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. The difficulty is a free choice at every level.

The rules of the road are real ones. Traffic lights and stop signs are live, and the banner turns red when the cab has to stop; the autopilot obeys them. The cab cannot leave the road — the kerb holds it in. Clipping another car costs the tip and marks the bodywork, and that is all it costs: nothing here ends the shift.

2D or 3D is the camera.C — or the camera button — steps three ways of looking at the city. 3D chase, behind the cab, is where the game is played; 3D cockpit is from the driver's seat; and 2D map is the north-up street plan, the only view where the street names are legible, and worth a look because in Cairo every one of those names is another line of Arabic to read — شارع قصر النيل, شارع طلعت حرب, ميدان التحرير. Q and E crane you round to check a junction.

Everything is spoken as well as written. Your fare talks in their own voice and the satnav comes in another, and the Voice slider in the sound menu governs both. A machine with no Egyptian voice installed simply stays quiet and the game plays exactly the same read; the line under the map says so if that is you.