| Guess | Manufacturer | Origin | First flight | Role | Number built |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
How to play Plane-dle
Plane-dle has no image. You get six guesses at one aircraft type out of 393, and everything you learn comes from how your previous guesses scored against five columns.
You get 6 guesses. Each one is scored against 5 columns - Manufacturer, Origin, First flight, Role and Number built - and the scoring is the whole game: you are narrowing a field rather than naming it cold.
Manufacturer and Origin are exact or nothing: the cell turns green when your guess holds the same value as the answer, and stays blank when it does not. Role is a family tree rather than a flat list: the same value is green, and a value that sits in the same branch as the answer comes back yellow and names the branch the two share. A value in another branch is blank. First flight and Number built are numbers, and an arrow points from your guess towards the answer, so a wrong number still tells you which way to go.
A column the source leaves blank is marked as having no data rather than scored. It cannot come back green for anyone, on any guess, which means an unrecorded value is never a lucky hit - and the gap itself is a fact about the record, so the grid shows it instead of hiding it.
Attributes only, by decision
The other guessing games here lean on a picture or a drawn shape. This one deliberately does not: it shipped attribute-first, with iconic silhouettes left as a later piece of work rather than bolted on.
That changes how the game plays. Your opening guess is a probe rather than an attempt, and the useful opener is often an aircraft you are confident is wrong but which sits in a helpful part of the space: a 1930s piston airliner, or a modern twin, just to see which way the arrows point.
What the columns tell you
Manufacturer, Origin and Role are match-or-miss, and the roles include airliner, fighter, bomber, transport, helicopter, trainer, reconnaissance and drone, so a role match alone can cut the field hard.
First flight is a decade, with an arrow pointing toward the answer. Number built is the spotter's column: an arrow again, over a range that runs from a single airframe to tens of thousands. Aircraft with no dependable production figure are shown as unknown instead of a made-up number.
Where the data comes from, and what was left out
The dataset is Wikidata, CC0 1.0. Candidate columns had to be populated across most of the pool to ship, and the ones that failed were dropped rather than padded with guesses. Engine count and production status both fell short and were left out of the grid.
The reveal names the aircraft and shows an English Wikipedia summary excerpt under CC BY-SA 4.0 with a link to the article. The five columns in your finished grid are the key facts, so the card is background rather than a second table.
After the puzzle
Finishing unlocks a run of bonus questions, and the number varies by day depending on what the data supports: which of two aircraft flew first, which one comes from a named country, which one fills a named role, which of two has the wider wingspan, more engines, or the longer range, and which aircraft a named designer drew.
The designer and country questions only appear when the underlying facts line up, which is why the set is a different length each day.
Where the data comes from
Plane-dle is built on one openly licensed dataset, frozen into the game before it goes out. The licence is named next to each one above, and the same list, with the per-record detail, is on the Plane-dle attribution page.
The writing you get on the reveal is english Wikipedia summary excerpt, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is quoted or generated from the source, never written by a language model while you play, and it carries its own credit and licence line wherever it appears.
The pool holds 393 entries and the calendar already runs 393 days, one answer a day, no repeats. That sequence was built offline before release and ships inside the game, so it is the same for everyone and nobody can read tomorrow out of the page. The day rolls over at midnight UTC.
Nothing is lost when a day ends. Every puzzle that has already run stays playable in the archive, and its answer, with the same reading you would have got by finishing it, is published the day after it ran.
Every past answer · Sources and licences in full · Plane-dle on Gamecove
Questions
- Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
- Yes. One aircraft a day out of the 393, the same for every player, rolling over at midnight UTC.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Nothing is stored server-side. Your streak and stats live in your browser's local storage.
- Why is there no photo or silhouette?
- Version one was built attribute-first, and an aircraft silhouette set is recorded as a later slice rather than something rushed in. In the meantime the guessing is pure deduction from the columns.