Mandarin Airport: Check In the Passengers

How to play: you are the ground staff at the Experdize Air terminal in Beijing, and every passenger speaks Chinese — this game teaches the language of boarding a flight and flying on a plane. Every check comes up on the panel as a question in Mandarin, and the terminal stands still while a question is up, so read at your own pace: there is no clock to beat, and the record is how long the level takes 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: the booking in characters against the pinyin passport — 张伟 against ZHANG WEI — where the mismatches are near misses a Chinese name really suffers (a homophone, a look-alike, a tone the passport cannot show), then the seat — 靠窗kào chuāng the window, 靠走廊kào zǒuláng the aisle, 都可以 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 Chinese numerals against 限重二十三公斤 (公斤 is a whole kilo, where 斤 is half of one), 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 打火机 are confiscated, 钥匙 and 零钱 are legal — and level 5 the X-ray, where 一瓶水 and 喷雾罐 do not fly. Level 6 opens the information booth: people ask the way — 值机在哪里？ 行李提取处在哪里？ — 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 几号登机口 and you read the departures board — 飞往上海, 飞往首尔 — for 二号, 十二号 or 三十二号登机口. From level 9 the board shows each flight's status — 准点, 延误, 取消, 开始登机, 最后广播 — 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 pinyin and English, Intermediate pinyin alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. What is spoken out loud is always the Mandarin.