Tube station games: guess the London Underground station

If you want a daily game about the London Underground, you currently have two good options: Metrodle, which turns the Tube map itself into the puzzle, and DailyMetro, which I make, where you guess a mystery station from its clues. They're different enough that plenty of people play both.

Metrodle: the Tube map with the labels ripped off

Metrodle hands you a zoomed-in crop of the Tube map with the station names and line colours removed, and the mystery station sitting in the middle of it. You get six guesses, and each wrong one tells you how many stops you are from the target, in which direction, and colours in a little more of the map. If you've spent years staring at the map above the doors, the bare geometry is weirdly readable. That moment when an unlabelled grey curve suddenly registers as the Central line is the whole game.

DailyMetro: one station a day, 273 to know

The London edition of DailyMetro works differently. There's one mystery station per day, you type in guesses, and each one gets compared to the answer: which lines you share, a compass arrow pointing toward it, how long the name is, and which area of London it sits in. No guess limit, you keep going until the row turns green, and quicker wins score more.

The dataset behind it is the Underground proper: 273 stations across all eleven lines, from the Victoria line down to the Waterloo & City and its grand total of two stations. No Overground, no DLR, no Elizabeth line, just the Tube. The data carries some nice texture too: the oldest station in the set is Finsbury Park, whose railway platforms date to 1861, and the busiest is Waterloo at roughly 77 million riders a year.

The Photo mode, or why you should look up from your phone

London is one of four cities where DailyMetro also has a Photo mode. We collected 87 real photographs of Tube station entrances, blurred out the names and roundel text, and you get six tries to identify the station from the picture. It starts zoomed in tight and pulls back a little with each wrong guess.

It sounds impossible and mostly isn't. Tube entrances are far more distinctive than you'd think: the ox-blood tiles of the Leslie Green stations, the brick suburban ones out west, the glass boxes of the Jubilee extension. After a couple of weeks of playing you start recognising entrance architecture on actual streets, which is either a superpower or a mild affliction.

Which one to play

Metrodle rewards map memory, DailyMetro rewards knowing the stations themselves (their lines, their area, their names). If you'd rather read than guess, the London explorer has a page for every line and station in the dataset, including each line's oldest station and busiest stops.