French Airport: Check In the Passengers

How to play: you are the ground agent at the Experdize Air check-in at Roissy, and every passenger speaks French — this game teaches the language of checking in for a flight. Passengers file through the stanchion ropes to the one desk, and every check comes up on the panel as a question in French. 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 against the passport — Michèle Lefèvre against MICHELE LEFEVRE. ⚠ The mismatches are homophones: Michèle against Michelle, Dupont against Dupond, Renaud against Renault against Renaut, Lefèvre against Lefebvre — the same name said aloud, spelled another way, and the difference is always a letter nobody pronounces. That is why French speakers spell a surname out loud («Dupont, avec un T») as a matter of course. ⚠ And the passport cannot help you with accents: the machine-readable strip along the bottom is plain A–Z, so LEFÈVRE goes in as LEFEVRE. The LETTERS are what you check. Then they ask for a seat — côté hublot the window, côté couloir the aisle, n'importe either. 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 words against La limite est de vingt-trois kilos, and the plural s goes on the kilos and never on the vingt, 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 — un briquet and des ciseaux are confiscated, les clés and de la monnaie are legal; the article is part of every word — and level 5 the X-ray, where une bouteille d'eau and un aérosol do not fly. Level 6 opens the information booth: people ask the way — Où est la douane ?, Où est la livraison des bagages ? — 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 quelle porte and you read the departures board — à destination de Londres, de Séville — for porte deux, porte douze or porte trente-deux. From level 9 the board shows each flight's status — à l'heure, retardé, annulé, l'embarquement, le dernier appel — 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: Débutant adds the say-it-like-this and English, Intermédiaire the say-it-like-this alone, Avancé the French by itself. What is spoken out loud is always the French.