How to play Wingcote

A visual guide · Land your first plane

Your goal

Draw every plane home to its own colour.

Little planes fly in from the sea around the island. Draw a line from each plane to the landing site of its own colour, and keep them apart. Wingcote runs in real time and never runs out of planes: the island simply gets busier until two planes touch, or until you end the run yourself.

These pictures are simplified teaching diagrams, drawn in the game's own colours with its real plane sprites.

01Draw your first path

Press on a plane and drag with your finger or mouse. The plane follows your line while you draw, so you can steer it as it goes. Your very first drag also starts the run; nothing moves until then.

1. Drag from the plane

A simplified teaching example. Start on the plane and draw toward the pad of its colour. While the line does not reach the right site it stays dashed.

2. It lands by itself

Once the line reaches the matching site it turns solid. The plane follows it, lands and scores. Here a middle sized plane earns 15 points.

A solid line means the plane will land · a dashed line means it will not land yet.
Draw from a plane again any time to give it a new line.
A plane with no line flies straight and turns back at the edge of the map.

Keyboard: Q and E pick a plane · Enter sends it home · arrow keys steer · H circles. W, A, S and D also steer, and comma and full stop also pick a plane. Space or Enter also starts the run.

02Land on the matching site

Pads and strips land differently

A simplified teaching example. Square pads take a plane from any direction. Long strips only take a plane flying along their arrow; a plane crossing sideways simply flies over. Ticks and crosses mark each case, so colour is never the only clue.

Every plane flies home to the site of its own colour. A plane crossing another colour's site just flies over it.
For a strip, swing round early so the plane lines up with the arrow before it reaches the island.
While you hold a plane, its home site lights up with corner brackets, so you can find it without relying on colour.
A site that has not opened yet shows a grey flag and striped tarmac.

03Keep planes apart

Red rings: too close

A red ring appears on both planes about 1.5 seconds before they would touch. Give one of them a new line.

Tap to circle

Tap a plane to send it round one tidy circle, then it carries on straight. It is a quick way to hold a plane while you sort out other traffic.

Two planes touching in the air ends the run. Points you have already earned stay yours.
Deal with the planes closest to trouble first, then draw the easy ones home.

04Grey planes and clouds

Things you cannot steer

A simplified teaching example. Grey planes follow a fixed dashed track that appears before they arrive. A cloud scrambles radios and closes the site underneath it.

Grey planes pass straight through and cannot be steered, so steer your own planes clear of their track.
A plane that flies into a cloud loses its line and flies straight until it leaves the cloud.
A site under a cloud is closed: its flag turns grey with a padlock, and planes fly over it until the cloud drifts away.

05Score and multiplier

Plane size and landings in a row

Each landing scores by plane size, times your multiplier. Landing planes back to back raises the multiplier, all the way to ×5.

Score

Your points this run.

Landed

How many planes you have landed safely.

×3 and its bar

Your multiplier. The bar drains between landings; land again before it empties.

Big planes are slow and score 10. Middle planes score 15. Small quick planes score 20.
At the start you have 8 seconds after each landing to keep a streak going. That time falls to 6.5, then 5.5, then 5 seconds as the island gets busier.
When the bar empties the multiplier starts again from ×1. Points already earned are never taken away.

06An endless, busier island

What changes as you play

Every 40 seconds of play the island gets busier, and it keeps going with no final stage: more planes at once, new sites, quicker traffic and less time between landings.

The run ends when two planes touch. A single line then shows how many safe landings you made.
To stop and keep your score, tap End Run twice within two seconds. Escape twice does the same.

Opening this Visual Guide pauses the planes. Close it, then tap the game to resume.

Play Wingcote