Mini Metro: The Best Holiday Game for Public Transit Lovers!

Already bored of your Christmas Gifts? Mini Metro makes you appreciate the wonders and complexity of a good metro system

The Christmas holidays are here, and I bet you’re already getting a bit tired of the Christmas ham leftovers your mom forced you to bring home, or the 6th pair of socks from your distant cousins.

Last week, while riding the train to be done with the last of my Christmas shopping, I found myself transfixed by a map. I look at transit maps all the time, but it’s always just a fleeting glance; I see where I am and where I need to go, then I’m done. But this time was different. I was struck by how clean and orderly the map looked, and analyzed it for tips on how I could make mine the same. Clearly I’ve been playing too much Mini Metro.

Mini Metro is a game about making subway maps. You start with just a few stations, which connect with a bright and colorful track, and then more pop up over time. The goal is to keep things running smoothly even as the transit system balloons to dozens of stops and multiple lines. The game started out as a browser-based prototype in 2014, and has since it became popular been ported to almost every conceivable platform.

Most of what you’re doing in Mini Metro is manipulating tracks. You have no control over the location of the various stations. They simply pop up every so often, and you need to adjust and expand the tracks to keep up with the demand, adding new trains or carriages when you can. This makes it an ideal game for touch. It feels natural pulling the lines with your finger, and you can pinch to zoom in and out when the map starts to get really huge. If you want to move a train to a different line, simply drag it where you want. It’s incredibly satisfying when you fix things with a quick drag of your finger.

Mini Metro is a fairly simple concept, but the game does a good job of keeping things interesting by offering 13 different maps to play through, each with its own distinct feel. If you play the Cairo map, for instance, you’ll have to deal with trains that can hold fewer passengers, while Osaka offers high-speed bullet trains to deal with lots of riders. They also have different layouts; you have to build over rivers in New York, and connect tightly packed stations in Paris.

In the end, what takes minutes to learn takes years to master, and since its release in 2014, its still a very popular game where new high scores are set all the time.

So, if you’re getting a bit bored of the holidays, and did not already love public transit, this is a game that helps you appreciate its complexity and beauty. And will keep you entertained until New Years Eve! A must-play game for any fan of railways and for anyone who has a phone!

5/5!