Best Of

In MiniMetro, you have to plan an underground train system. Pick a city (the decision affects the shape of the bodies of water as well as the types of trains available), then try to keep up with the randomly generated stations that pop up around the city. You always start with three stations, easy-peasey, then more pop up day after day, and you have to keep them all connected. Your available stable of tracks, locomotives, carriages, interchange platforms, and bridges builds up slowly week by week as people move about the city, but you are not given enough resources to actually keep up with demand for transport. You just have to do the best you can with what you have, until eventually a station gets too crowded for too long and the challenge ends. The more people you move before that time, the higher your score.

It's a relaxing and kind of pretty game. The interface is minimal and slick, the controls are super simple (just draw lines) and the boards end up looking like classic underground train maps. The music and sound effects are dynamic and soothing. They are based on what you're doing in the game, as your rail system gets more complex, the music gets more complex. It's the first non-narrative-driven game that I've really enjoyed in a really long time.

In-game leader-boards tell you how you are doing in each city compared to your friends, and each day has a daily challenge that allows everyone to play the same map - with all the station pop-ups coming at the same time and place to make it a fair comparison.

Here is an animated GIF screenshot of my most recent attempt to lift my high-score in New York (in night-mode because night-mode is available):

That was about 20 minutes of gameplay. Of course it doesn't show the trains and passengers, just a record of how and where I changed up my lines as new stations appeared.

If all that sounds interesting, it's available on Steam. It was a bit cheaper during the recent sale, but I din't know how neat it was until after the sale was over. Still, it's not a terribly pricey game.

I would be pleased to have more friends to compare high-scores with. Try to beat my London score. It's pretty high.