NYC subway games: the field, compared

New York has the deepest bench of transit games of any city, which makes sense: it also has the most complicated system to be smug about. Below are the ones worth playing, what each of them actually asks of you, and where mine fits. I make DailyMetro, so treat that section as the biased one.

For scale, the playable New York set here runs to 443 stations across 23 services, from the 7 crossing Queens to the A rattling out to the Rockaways. Sixty-eight of those stations serve three or more services, which is why New York games can be so much harder than their equivalents elsewhere.

Subwaydle: guess the trip, not the station

Subwaydle, by New York developer Sunny Ng, is the genre's landmark game and still the hardest. You do not guess a station. You guess an entire ride: three trains, two valid transfers, six attempts. Feedback is exactly Wordle's, applied to line bullets: green if a train belongs in that position, yellow if it belongs in the route but somewhere else, grey if it has no business being there at all.

Weekday puzzles come from thousands of valid combinations, and weekends draw from a separate, smaller pool because the service pattern changes, a detail that tells you everything about the level of care in it. If you know where the M runs on a Saturday, this is your game. If you do not, it will teach you, slowly and painfully.

Metro Memory New York: name them from nothing

Metro Memory, by Benjamin Tran Dinh, hands you an empty map and asks how many stations you can type from memory. No clues, no timer. It is the most-played game in the genre worldwide (its London edition went viral in 2023 and it now covers more than 25 cities) and the fastest way to get an honest number for what you know.

New York punishes people here in a specific way: you will get Manhattan almost entirely, then discover that Brooklyn alone has 159 stations in the data and you can name maybe thirty of them.

DailyMetro: one station a day, with clues

Mine, and the gentlest of the three. Every day there is one mystery station, and each guess is compared to it across a row of clues: which services you share, a compass arrow pointing toward the answer, the length of the name, and the borough. There is no cap on guesses, so you always finish; the fewer you use, the more you score. A harder Connaisseur mode swaps the easy clues for annual ridership and opening year.

There is also a Map mode in every city: the station sits marked on a blank map and every miss peels back a layer: the streets around it first, then its own line in grey, then in colour, then the whole network. New York does not have Photo mode yet (that runs in Paris, London, Berlin and Washington today).

The New York numbers behind the puzzles: the 2 is the largest single pool at 49 stations, the S shuttles are the smallest at 11, and Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center carries nine services, tied with Times Square-42nd Street. The oldest stop in the data opened in 1869 in Far Rockaway, decades before the subway itself, back when the line was a Long Island steam railroad. If you would rather study than guess, the New York explorer has a page per service and per station.

The short version

They train different muscles. Subwaydle is routing, Metro Memory is recall, DailyMetro is deduction about individual stations. A sensible order: Metro Memory once for the baseline, DailyMetro daily to actually learn the stations, Subwaydle when you want to be humbled before 9am. There is also a longer piece on how the daily transit guessers compare, and a tour of the whole genre by family if you want games from other cities too.