You're a tourist in the family spaceship, stuck in line at a spaceport gate. The ship ahead has a plate like IW84N1. Say it out loud, type what it means (I wait for no one), and the line moves up.
Each ship in the line carries a vanity-style plate of six to eight characters. Numbers and letters stand in for sounds and words: 8 is "ate", 4 is "for", U is "you", N1 is "no one". Work out the phrase and type it in. When you solve it, the ship ahead peels off into its lane and you move up one place. Clear the line and your ship jumps to the next world.
Under the plate is one blank per word of the answer, showing how many letters each word has. A right word locks green as you type, and a wrong one clears. Case and punctuation don't matter.
Plates have said something about their owners from the start. When New York required cars to be registered in 1901, the law said every car must carry "the separate initials of the owner's name" on the back, and owners made the plates themselves, according to AAA's licence plate timeline. The same timeline says Pennsylvania became the first state to issue customised plates in 1931, though drivers could only add their initials. In Connecticut, [a history of that state's plates](http://ctplates.info/home/passenger-car-gallery/vanity/) dates its "Initial" plates to 1937: motorists with good driving records could have two or three letters, and because the combinations ran out, people had to get creative.
Personalised plates are now issued by every U.S. state and the District of Columbia, and every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador, according to Wikipedia's vanity plate article. It reports a 2007 survey by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators and author Stefan Lonce that counted 9.7 million vehicles with vanity plates in North America, with Virginia highest at 16.19% of vehicles, a rate put down to the low extra cost. The same article says the UK's DVLA began selling personalised registrations unrelated to registration districts in 1989 and sold more than 4.2 million in the first 25 years, and that when Norway opened applications in 2017, the government's Public Roads website reportedly crashed within minutes.
The puzzle comes from the space limit. Pennsylvania allows up to seven characters plus one dash or space on a standard plate, and New Hampshire allows up to seven characters for passenger plates, using letters, the numbers 1 to 9, and the ampersand, hyphen and plus sign. So owners squeeze words into sounds: New Hampshire Public Radio headlined its listener round-up "GR8PL8", and one listener spotted "&SQRRL" on a moose plate (moose and squirrel). Virginia even counts a space or hyphen as half a character.
Every U.S. state and Canadian province that issues vanity plates keeps a list of banned words and combinations, but, as Wikipedia notes, the list is not definitive: a clerk can turn down a plate deemed offensive even if it matches no banned word, and a DMV can revoke one it already approved. That discretion has limits, because some motorists have successfully sued under the First Amendment. SFGate reports that the California DMV rejects hundreds of vanity plates every year.
Some plates become stories. A security researcher bought the plate NULL in 2016 as a programmer's joke, and, SFGate reported, it brought him thousands of dollars in parking tickets, some written in 2014, two years before he had the plate. And decoding plates was a game long before this one: Bumper Stumpers, a Canadian game show that aired on Global and the USA Network from 1987 to 1990, had two teams decipher puzzles presented as fictional vanity plates.
Space Plates is a free browser word game with a Journey across the solar system and a Daily round. There's nothing to download and no sign-up. It is in English only, because the plate language is built on English sounds.
Every plate in the game is original to PlayPendium. None is copied from a real car, a photo or a list of rejected plates. The painted spaceport backdrops were generated with AI tools, and the gate signs and lane names are invented.