Metro games: the complete guide to the genre

There is now a whole genre of games about metro systems, and nobody keeps a list. So here is one, written by someone with an obvious conflict of interest: I make DailyMetro, one of the games below. I have tried to be useful rather than flattering, which mostly means telling you when another game does a thing better than mine does.

The genre splits into five families. Pick the family that matches what you actually enjoy, then pick the game inside it that covers your city.

1. Daily station guessers

One mystery station a day, clues that narrow after every guess. This is the Wordle-shaped corner of the genre, and it is the one that turns into a habit: a two-minute puzzle attached to a network you use anyway.

DailyMetro is mine. Every day, one station to find; each guess is compared to the answer across a row of clues (shared lines, a compass arrow pointing at the answer, name length, neighborhood), and there is no cap on guesses, so nobody is ever locked out of the day. Twenty-one city editions, seven live today and the rest arriving through mid-October. Every city also has a Map mode (the station is marked on an empty 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), and four cities have a Photo mode where you identify a station from a photo of its street entrance with the name blurred out.

What it does well: the daily ritual, and breadth. What it does badly: exactly one station per mode per day, so if you want to binge for an hour, the memory games below are a better use of your evening.

2. Memory tests: name them all

No clues, no hints, no mercy. You type station names from memory and watch a map fill in, and the score is the percentage of the network you could actually summon.

Metro Memory, by French developer Benjamin Tran Dinh, is the reference here and the most widely played game in the genre. It went viral with its London edition in 2023 and now runs more than 25 city editions, from Paris and New York to Busan, Karlsruhe and Kuala Lumpur. It is the fastest honest answer to "how well do I really know my city?", and the honest answer is usually humbling.

Play it once before anything else. A brutal percentage is the best possible motivation for the daily games.

3. Route puzzles: guess the trip

The hardest family. You are not guessing a place, you are guessing a journey, which means you need to know how the network connects, not just what it contains.

Subwaydle, by New York developer Sunny Ng, gives you six tries to reconstruct the day's three-train ride with two valid transfers between two of the subway's stations. Feedback is pure Wordle: a line goes green if it is in the route in the right position, yellow if it is in the route but out of order, grey if it is not in the trip at all. Weekday puzzles are drawn from thousands of valid combinations, and weekends have their own smaller pool because the service pattern changes.

Roundle is the London-shaped sibling on the same domain. If you can hold the difference between the Circle and the Hammersmith & City in your head, it is your game.

4. Map readers and map crops

These games hide the labels and leave the geometry, which is a very different skill: you win by recognising shapes rather than recalling names.

• Metrodle (London): a tight, unlabelled crop of the Tube map with the mystery station in the middle, six guesses, each miss telling you how many stops away you are and in which direction.
• Tuble (London): the same premise reduced to numbers, leaning on zone and distance instead of graphics.
• MRT Guessr (Singapore): built by Rat Games Studio, a team led by SUTD student Aaron Tua. Five modes, including a multiplayer lobby and a Singapore Tour that asks for all 146 stations, with the leaderboard record around three minutes.
• Chicago Guessr (Chicago): GeoGuessr logic applied to the L, where you place stations on the map rather than name them.
• DailyMetro's Map mode: the daily-guesser version of this idea, available in all 21 cities.

5. Grids, line quizzes and the offline shelf

The long tail is where the genre gets genuinely inventive. Métrodoku (Paris) is a daily nine-cell grid where every answer has to satisfy a line constraint and a column constraint at once, with an originality score that rewards the least obvious valid station. Routle (San Francisco) shows you the bare shape of one Muni route against a white background and gives you five tries to name it, from an author, River Honer, who built the first version in a day. ParisGuessr is a whole arcade of Île-de-France mini-games covering the RER and buses as well as the metro.

Off-screen, Blue Orange's Next Station series (London, Tokyo, Paris) is a flip-and-write board game where each player draws four metro lines across their own map of the city, monuments included. It is the only entry on this page that works with people who have never voluntarily looked at a transit map, which makes it the best gateway drug in the genre. And Mini Metro (Dinosaur Polo Club, 2015) remains the elegant simulation cousin: you do not guess anything, you build a network and then watch it collapse under its own success.

Which one should you play?

My honest routine: Metro Memory once a year to see whether I am improving, a daily station and Map mode on DailyMetro, and Subwaydle on days when I want to be reminded that I do not really understand New York.

City by city

The scene looks different in every city, so there is a page per network: Paris, New York, London, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago and Singapore.