London Underground games: the whole field

London is where this whole genre broke out. A memory game about the Tube went viral in autumn 2023, the press picked it up, and within months there were half a dozen daily puzzles built on Harry Beck's map. Here is the current field, what each one asks of you, and which to play first. I make DailyMetro, so discount that section accordingly.

All of them draw on the same raw material: 272 stations over 11 lines, from the District at 60 stations down to the Waterloo & City with its magnificent two.

Metro Memory London: the one that started it

Metro Memory, by French developer Benjamin Tran Dinh, gives you a blank Tube map and asks you to type every station you can remember. ITV News and half of London covered it in October 2023, and it has since grown into more than 25 city editions.

It remains the most efficient ego check in transit gaming. You will clear Zone 1 in three minutes, then sit there for ten more trying to remember anything on the Metropolitan past Harrow.

Metrodle: read the map with the labels off

Metrodle shows you a tight crop of the Tube map with the names stripped and the line colours drained, your mystery station sitting in the middle. Six guesses. Each wrong answer tells you how many stops away you are and in which direction, and opens up a little more of the crop.

It is a geometry puzzle rather than a trivia one: you win by recognising the shape of a junction, which is a genuinely different skill from knowing names. Londonist covered it early and it is still the cleanest execution of the idea.

Roundle and Tuble: the same idea, harder and leaner

Roundle is the London puzzle built on the same platform as New York's Subwaydle, so it comes from the trip-guessing school: the challenge is the journey rather than the destination. Tuble strips the graphics out altogether and gives you zone and distance information instead, which sounds austere and turns out to be oddly addictive.

DailyMetro: one station a day, three ways

Mine. Every day there is one mystery station, and each guess is compared to the answer across a row of clues: shared lines, a compass arrow pointing at the answer, name length and borough. No cap on guesses, so you always finish the day, and the fewer you take the higher you score. Connaisseur mode swaps the two easy clues for annual ridership and the origin of the station's name.

London is one of only two cities with all three modes. Map mode marks the station on an empty map and reveals a layer with every miss (the streets around it, then its own line in grey, then in colour, then the whole network). Photo mode shows you a real photograph of a station entrance with the name and roundel blurred, and asks you to recognise the street; 87 London entrances are in that set, which is the largest photo set in the game.

The London numbers behind the puzzles: King's Cross St Pancras carries six lines, more than anywhere else, and 22 stations serve three or more. Waterloo is the busiest in the set at 77.4 million entries a year, and Roding Valley the quietest at 170,000, a ratio of about 450 to 1 on the same network. The oldest entry is Kensington (Olympia), 1862, older than the Metropolitan Railway's first passenger run. The London explorer has a page for every line and station if you would rather revise.

The comparison

Suggested order: Metro Memory tonight for the number, then whichever daily fits your commute. There is a longer piece on how DailyMetro's Tube game works, and a tour of the whole genre by family covering the other cities.