About TAF Daily
Fourteen daily games, built on public data, by a very small shop
TAF Daily gives you one real terminal aerodrome forecast and five questions about it. A TAF covers a block of hours instead of a single moment, so the puzzle is less about reading one value and more about tracking how a station expects its conditions to change.
TAF Daily is one of the fourteen daily games on Gamecove, and the rest of this page is about the site all fourteen share. What this one is built from, column by column, is set out on its own page under the puzzle, and the sources and licences in full are on the attribution page.
What this is
Gamecove is a family of fourteen daily guessing games. They share one engine, one layout and one set of rules, and each one is dressed in the material world of its own subject: a nautical chart for the ships, a cockpit panel for the aviation weather, seismograph drum paper for the earthquakes, a museum specimen card for the minerals.
The point of each game is the moment after the puzzle ends. You guessed a lighthouse, and now you know it is a granite tower from the 1850s with a focal plane forty metres up and a light visible for eighteen nautical miles, and that is a slightly different way of looking at a coastline than you had yesterday.
How the daily puzzle is chosen
The answer is not a hash of the date, and it is not random. Each game carries a curated calendar built offline before release: a fixed sequence of puzzles with no repeats, ordered so that the answers most of the world writes about come first and the obscure ones come later. In the three decoding games the difficulty ramp runs across the week instead, from an easy Monday to a hard Sunday, by moving the wrong options closer to the right one.
Because the calendars are frozen and shipped with the game, everyone gets the same puzzle on the same day, and the answer for a future day is never present in the page you are looking at. In the two aviation games the calendar is topped up daily from the live weather feed instead, so the report you decode is a real one filed in the last day or so.
Puzzles you have missed stay playable in each game’s archive, and each game shows yesterday’s answer on its own page.
Open data, named sources
A game only gets built if its subject has a public, openly licensed dataset behind it. That rule is why there is a volcano game and a mineral game but no film game: we are not going to guess at facts, and we are not going to launder someone else’s licensed database into a puzzle.
Each game lists its sources and their licences on its own attribution page, including the licence of every photograph in the one game that uses photographs. Where the reveal quotes Wikipedia, it says so and credits it under CC BY-SA 4.0.
No accounts, no tracking
There is no sign-up, no login and nothing to fill in. Your streak, your stats and the puzzles you have finished are kept in your own browser’s local storage and are never sent to us. Each game has a control on its cookies page that lets you export that record as a file and import it into another browser, which is the only way it ever moves between devices.
The site runs no analytics and no tracking scripts. No advertising is served on Gamecove today, and no advertising cookies are set. If that changes, the games will ask for a choice first in the regions where consent is required, and the cookies page will say plainly what is being set.
Who builds it
Gamecove is built by MTC Lab, a one-person software shop. The games are made properly rather than quickly: each one starts from a check that the data actually exists and is properly licensed, and none of them ship until they have been played end to end.
Corrections, bug reports and suggestions for new games are all welcome, and a correction to a fact is the most useful message you can send.