Chicago CTA games: the L, as a puzzle

Chicago has one of the great puzzle systems and almost nobody has built games on it. Eight lines named after colours, 144 stations, a downtown named after the loop the trains make around it: the L is practically pre-designed for guessing games, and yet the field is small. Here is what exists, plus mine. I make DailyMetro, whose Chicago edition launches on September 24, 2026 and is already playable in early access.

Chicago Guessr: place the station

Chicago Guessr applies GeoGuessr logic to the CTA: rather than naming a station, you locate it, which turns the game into a test of the city's grid as much as of the transit map. It is the strongest locally built entry, and it rewards exactly the knowledge that living here gives you.

Metro Memory Chicago: the blank-map test

Metro Memory Chicago, by Benjamin Tran Dinh, hands you an empty map and asks how many L stations you can type from memory. No hints, no timer. It is part of the family that went viral with London in 2023 and now covers more than 25 cities.

Chicago has a particular failure mode here: the Loop is easy, the Red line is easy, and then you discover that the Pink and Purple lines exist as a set of names you have seen a thousand times on a map and never once said out loud.

DailyMetro Chicago: one station a day, with clues

Mine, and as far as I can find the only daily guess-the-station game built for the L. Each day there is one mystery station, and every guess is compared to the answer across a row of clues: which colour lines you share, a compass arrow pointing toward the answer, the length of the name, and the neighborhood. No cap on guesses, so the day is always finishable; fewer tries scores higher. Connaisseur mode swaps the easy clues for annual ridership and opening year, which on a system with stations from 1892 is a real test.

There is also a Map mode: the station sits marked on a blank map and each miss peels back a layer: the streets around it first, then its own line in grey, then in colour, then the whole network. Chicago's grid makes this the fairest Map mode in the game, and the Loop makes it the cruellest, because sixteen stations sit inside it a few hundred metres apart.

The numbers behind the puzzles: the Red and Blue lines are the biggest pools at 33 stations each (fittingly, the two that run all night), and the Yellow line has exactly three, so a Yellow guess either wins your day instantly or wastes a turn in style. Clark/Lake serves six lines, more than anywhere else. The oldest stations in the data opened in 1892 on what is now the Green line, when the South Side Elevated ran on steam; the newest is Washington/Wabash, 2017. The Chicago explorer has a reference page per line and per station.

The comparison

There is a longer piece on how the Chicago edition plays, and a tour of the whole genre by family if you want to see what New York, London and Paris have built.