Spanish Airport: Check In the Passengers

How to play: you are the ground agent at the Experdize Air check-in at Barajas, and every passenger speaks Spanish — 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 Spanish. 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 — María García López against GARCIA LOPEZ Maria. ⚠ Every Spaniard carries two surnames — the father's, then the mother's — and both are on the passport. Dropping the second one is not a shortening, it is a different person, and it is the commonest thing a foreign booking system does to a Spanish name. The other mismatches are sounds Spanish genuinely cannot tell apart: b and v are one sound (Vargas and Bargas), and in most of the language so are z, c and s (Vázquez and Vásquez, Pérez and Peres — all of them real surnames). ⚠ And the passport's machine-readable strip is plain A–Z, so MUÑOZ goes in as MUNOZ: the ñ can never be the thing you are checking. Then they ask for a seat — ventanilla the window, pasillo the aisle, cualquiera 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 El límite son veintitrés kilos, and ⚠ twenty-one to twenty-nine are one word in Spanish where thirty-one onward are three, 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 mechero and unas tijeras are confiscated, las llaves and unas monedas are legal — and level 5 the X-ray, where una botella de agua and un aerosol do not fly. Level 6 opens the information booth: people ask the way — ¿La aduana, por favor?, ¿La cinta de equipajes, por favor? — 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 qué puerta and you read the departures board — con destino a Londres, a Nueva York — for puerta dos, puerta doce or puerta treinta y dos. From level 8 the board shows each flight's status — a la hora, retrasado, cancelado, embarcando, última llamada — 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: Principiante adds the say-it-like-this and English, Intermedio the say-it-like-this alone, Avanzado the Spanish by itself. What is spoken out loud is always the Spanish.