It’s a game on your phone… basically, you use real-time flight radar to “catch” aircraft and add them to your deck of cards. In a radius around your real-world location, aircraft are identified by type, tail number, airline if applicable, and origin/destination. They’re also color-coded by rarity; blue for common all the way to red for the weird ultra-rare oddballs. You click on the catch button and play a little picture-taking minigame, and if you’re successful you add the aircraft to your deck. Catch it multiple times and you can upgrade your card to look cooler
Them’s the basics, but you can get deep into it if you’re at all interested in aviation. If any other Dopers play, I’d be open to connecting as friends in-game, or just sharing your successes and celebrating your milestones!
Currently I’m most excited to see my first cyber orange card, the motor glider, and I’ve got 2 planes jockeying to see which will be the first to surpass 2M XP! The Cessna Skyhawk is gaining on the Boeing 737-800, but they’ve still got ~250k to go to 2M.
Yep, it’s free to download. The main thing you can buy in-game is coins, but I’ve had the game for a year and a half and haven’t spent a dime and I’ve amassed 15k coins 2 at a time for a “perfect catch.” Every 20 minutes you get 5 free photos to take, so you can get 10 coins every 20 minutes if you’re good at the minigame.
You can spend coins on extra photos or power-up items, but you also get items randomly while catching planes. You can spend 10 coins on 5 photos if you don’t want to wait 20 minutes for more free photos, or you can spend 75 coins for a half-hour of unlimited catches, 150 for two hours, and 300 coins for a half-hour with an upgraded camera that makes catching a lot of planes quickly much easier.
The other thing that the devs have added recently to spend real-world money on is “business class,” which is $20 USD for 7 days of unlimited photos with the upgraded camera. It seems ludicrously expensive for what it offers, which seems to be a common sentiment in the community.
Geez, I can go on and on about this silly little app.
Sounds interesting and good for your mind. Orange sounds pretty close to red, so that should happen soon. Are the rarer ones harder to catch, or are they simply hard to get because they are rare?
Yep, it goes from (the most common) to to to to (the rarest). As far as I can tell the only thing that will make catching a plane more difficult in the actual minigame is if it’s further away from the center of your radar. Red ones are tougher to catch mostly because there are fewer of those flying around less often than, say, a Boeing airliner or a little Piper or Cessna.
Spouse and I were obsessed for a while. Then they introduced some changes that broke the game for casual collectors/completionists, and it broke the spell. Devs reverted to make the game work as a fun f2p, but we’d already cooled a bit.
That said, I do log in whenever I’m traveling and enjoy catching new plane types and airports that aren’t the usual flyovers where I live. We were just in the UK and I added a bunch to my collection.
If you time your 75 coins for 1/2 hour of play when there are a lot of planes in your area, you can likely make up the entire 75 back again with perfect catches if you use the time efficiently. Or at least close enough that you’ll get back to net-zero with a few sessions outside of the 1/2 hour.
Some time pre Covid I was an enthusiastic player of a game called Skyjacker AR. The phone camera showed your surroundings with an overlay of flight paths. You’d select one, ‘hijack’ it, and pick a new destination for it. The plane would then simulate travel to its destination and you could not grab another plane until your hijacker landed. Through some process, you could recruit more hijackers to your crew eventually.
Points for each hijacking varied by a ton of metrics, including plane size, origin, uniqueness, length of travel before and after hijacking, I don’t know what all. The kicker was that while you got more points for a longer flight, that also left you vulnerable to another player subsequently killing your guy and taking your points.
I was an early player and part of the testing team. I got to document fun bugs, like being able to hijack a 2 seat light aircraft (where was my guy hiding?) on a local flight and diverting it to, say Tokyo. Many times in excess of the actual fuel capacity. But, man! You could rack up points that way. It was something like a 60 hour flight!
I’ve read the app description and several reviews but I’m unclear on one point: do you have to physically photograph the nearby plane in the sky with your phone’s camera? Or is it simulated?
At home we get a lot of air traffic (depending on approaches in use) but are in a heavily wooded area.
It’s just a simulated camera, the game is to snap a well-framed photo of the aircraft while avoiding areas with cloud obscuration. I’m a little disappointed in that, I thought there might be some actual AR component of panning around and attempting to spot a plane.
I feel like you might be referring to the seasons update… they experimented with the idea of doing seasons and essentially reset everyone’s progress, but they got review bombed and reversed course pretty soon after. I actually quit the game for several months around then, but my brother and one of my cousins convinced me to give it another shot. I certainly still have my nits to pick with it, but they’ve made some really nice changes lately, and I’m re-obsessed all over again.
As far as coins go, you can definitely earn your 75 coins back in a half-hour if you’re just catching everything in range at a busy enough airport!
The very first time I played this game, late at night while I couldn’t sleep, I was actually moving my camera around me trying to find where the plane was. I’m not bright sometimes.
I may have to give this a try, although I’m thinking of unusual planes I’ve seen in the past that I didn’t get to catch. I live close to Logan Airport, and travel by Hanscom Field on occasion, so that may present opportunities.
I got a fat wad of points today from a flight of three Hawker Hunters that passed overhead. We had some discussion of those jets (operated by a contractor as opposing forces for military exercises) when they caused an ugly incursion over Vegas a few, uh, whiles ago.
I’m seeing what I think might be a bug. On any given plane card, there’s a 3D rendering of that aircraft. It’s always black, like it’s skin and markings haven’t rendered. Anyone else see that?
My current rarity leader: A Berkut 360, at the ‘ultra’ rarity of 11.06. Anyone done better?
I’ve tried it a bit; kinda fun. There are some unusual aircraft flying near me, including a Piper Cub. And I found out that Cape Air is replacing their Cessna 402 with the Tecnam P2012.
When you upgrade a card from “paper” to bronze, and then on up from there, the 3D render will look different. It’s still a blank 3D render with no markings, but the higher tiers of cards are more attractive than the paper. Idk if I can add pictures from my phone to the SDMB, but if I can I can show you what the other cards look like.
As for my highest rarity, I caught something called a Temco Buckaroo in central Georgia (the State) once. It’s an 18.22 rarity!
I have my own ADSB antenna set up on my roof to track aircraft, but this is pretty fun too. Just started playing. Already got a couple of rare Cessnas - a P210 Pressurized Centurion (6.82) and a Cessna 340 (6.10).
Depending on where you live, you’ll be able to catch tail numbers marked NEW for ages! You simply can’t catch them fast enough at the beginning. As you unlock airports, you can virtually travel to the ones you’ve unlocked and use them as the center of your radar for a half-hour at a time.
If you’re on Discord and start to get into SkyCards, I recommend joining their Discord. It’s a good way to find out about rare aircraft popping up, or unlocking airports that don’t get a lot of traffic.
This has been fascinating. I don’t play games. None of the descriptions and tidbits anyone has given make any sense to oblivious me.
I’m not asking for a Skycard (or generic gaming) 101 tutorial. Just marveling at an utterly inaccessible conversation full of jargon that means nothing.
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(the most common) to 
to 
to 
to 
(the rarest). As far as I can tell the only thing that will make catching a plane more difficult in the actual minigame is if it’s further away from the center of your radar. Red ones are tougher to catch mostly because there are fewer of those flying around less often than, say, a Boeing airliner or a little Piper or Cessna.