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Comment by tromp

3 days ago

Sometimes the airlines chess app gives you the option to play another passenger, but even after waiting for half an hour I've never been hooked up with another player. Has anyone else been able to?

Yes, as someone who is usually flying with my GF, I love this feature! Unfortunately air canada's implementation is abysmal and anytime there is a pilot announcement it interrupts the game long enough to break the network connection and cause it to end the game.

It only works with passengers on your same flight. In practice, it's good for kids in the same family or school group who are sitting across the aisle from each other. I've used it for some of their other games

  • I know I'm getting old when I read comments like this. It wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years that it might pair me with passengers on another flight. I'm conditioned by having first experienced this feature probably 30 years or so ago when pairing to passengers on other flights would have been science fiction.

  • Aren't they all hooked up to Wi-Fi now? Why the restriction on same flight?

    • That's how the system was originally designed, before in flight WiFi was common. If they're gonna hook it up to the broader internet and allow playing games cross-flight, they might as well just hook it up to an existing service like chess.com and have a significantly larger user base imo

one flight I was on had trivia which allowed multiplayer. We ended up with about 10 playing the game. I thought it was a good idea for a networked computer and captive audience.

Yeah, that's my experience as well. I only did once, and it was against my father...

We should coordinate flights