Approach

Most actions on a Stream Deck are one key doing one thing. Approach uses the whole deck as a single piece of airspace: every tile is an airfield, the bezel gutters between them are real distance, and the aeroplanes you launch fly across them.

Passengers gather at each field wearing the shape and colour of where they want to go. Tap a field, then tap another, and everyone bound that way boards and flies. That is the entire control scheme — the only other gesture is a hold, which clears a field of everyone at once whether or not that is where they were going.

KEEP THEM APART: Two aeroplanes closer than the separation minimum ends the watch. So the game is not about the corridor you fly; it is about the one you do not. Select a field and every destination is marked, green where the corridor is clear and red where it would conflict. It predicts the whole flight against everything already airborne, taking the closest point of approach of each pair rather than comparing where they are now — so a warning means two aircraft would meet in twenty seconds, not that they look close today.

A COUNTRY UNDERNEATH: Every watch generates its own patch of ground and spreads it across the whole board: farmland, woods, a river or a coastline, roads running out to the edges, and a city or two picked out in lit windows. It is drawn dark on purpose, because the queues and corridors are what you need to read, but no two watches are flown over the same place.

SIX KINDS OF AIRFIELD: Single strips, parallel pairs, crossed runways, wartime triangles, hubs with finger piers, short coastal fields. Each is chosen when the field opens, so a board of a dozen airports does not read as one aerodrome stamped a dozen times. Runways point at the neighbours they trade with most.

READ IT AT A GLANCE: A field's queue is a list of destinations rather than a number, so you can see where the pressure is building. A heavily loaded aeroplane is drawn larger and flies slower, so a big lift looks like the commitment it is. Fields shake as they fill, and show a count once there are more waiting than you can take in at a look.

TWO WAYS TO LOSE: A collision is the obvious one. The other is gridlock: any field reaching ten waiting ends it too, and that is usually the one that gets you. Passengers dropped somewhere they did not ask for join that field's queue and need flying on, so a lazy clearance early becomes a cascade twenty flights later.

A BREATHER EVERY TEN FLIGHTS: Every tenth departure stands the airspace down for five seconds. Nobody new arrives, but the clock runs and the traffic already up carries on and lands, so it is a gap rather than a pause. It is usually when you notice the field you had been ignoring.

AUTO MODE: Hold the readout key, or use the settings, and the watch flies itself, always choosing a corridor it has checked. It never loses to a collision; it loses to gridlock, which is a fair demonstration that clearing fields is the real problem. The readout then becomes a commentary: the flight going out now, in letters you can read across a room, and the total carried.

IT IS MEANT TO END: Every ten carried opens another airfield, and traffic builds with the board, the score and the clock. There is no winning screen. The question is how much you carried first, and your best is kept between watches.

The airspace is the keys you give it: two for a quick game, a whole deck for a long one, with a running log on the last key. No account, no network requests, no analytics.

Works on any Stream Deck with keys, on macOS and Windows. Requires the Stream Deck app 7.1 or newer.

A backup that survives a crash

Approach now keeps its own backup of your best score on your computer, alongside Stream Deck's copy.

If a forced restart or a crash leaves Stream Deck's copy empty or out of date, Approach brings your best score back by itself.

Your best score is backed up the first time this version starts, so there is nothing to do.

Your best score stays as it was.