Best Paris metro games: the comparison

Paris has more games about its metro than any other city on earth, which is exactly what you would expect from a network where people argue about line 13 for sport. Five of them are worth your time. I built one of those five, DailyMetro, so read the DailyMetro section with the appropriate suspicion and the rest as a straight recommendation.

The 321 stations in the playable Paris set, spread over 16 lines including the two orphan shuttles (3bis and 7bis), are what all of these games are drawing from. That is a big enough pool that no two games feel alike.

Paris de tête: find out what you actually know

Start here, because everything else makes more sense once you have a number. Paris de tête, the Paris edition of Benjamin Tran Dinh's Metro Memory, asks you to type every Paris station you can remember and fills the map in as you go. No hints, no timer, no help. Most Parisians land somewhere between 40% and 60% and are annoyed about it for the rest of the day.

It is the fastest diagnostic in the genre. The lines you blank on are exactly the ones the daily games will punish you for later: the eastern half of line 9, the suburban tail of line 13, everything past Porte de Charenton.

Métrodoku: the thinking one

Métrodoku is a daily nine-cell grid. Each cell needs a station that satisfies both a line constraint and a column constraint at once, you get three mistakes, and an originality score rewards you for finding the valid answer nobody else thought of. There is a random mode for when one grid a day is not enough.

It is the most cerebral game about the Paris metro, because knowing the station names is not sufficient: you have to cross-reference them. It also has a special place in DailyMetro's history. Watching my best friend attack those grids is what gave me the idea in the first place, which I wrote about in the story of DailyMetro.

ParisGuessr: the arcade

ParisGuessr is the widest of the bunch: a collection of mini-games covering the whole Île-de-France network, so RER branches, trams and buses come along with the metro. Daily puzzles, station-linking games, grids, a memory game. If your particular pathology is knowing which branch of the RER C goes where, this is the only game here that will indulge it.

DailyMetro: one station a day, with clues

Mine. Every day there is one mystery station, and each guess is compared with it across a row of clues: which lines you share, a compass arrow pointing toward the answer, the length of the name, and which side of the river or which suburb it sits in. There is no guess cap, so you always finish the day; the fewer tries you take, the higher you score. A harder Connaisseur mode drops the name and area clues and hands you annual ridership and the origin of the station's name instead, which on a network where 152 stations are named after people is a genuinely different game.

Paris also has all three DailyMetro modes, which no other city except London has: Classic (the clue grid), Map (the station is marked on a blank map and each miss reveals another layer, from the surrounding streets to the lines themselves) and Photo, where you get a real photograph of a station entrance with the name and line roundels blurred out and have to recognise the street. Seventy-three Paris entrances are in the photo set.

The numbers behind the Paris puzzles: line 7 and line 8 are the deepest pools at 38 stations each, Châtelet and République carry five lines apiece, Gare du Nord is the busiest station in the set at 34.5 million entries a year, and the quietest is Église d'Auteuil at 120,000, which is fewer people in a year than Gare du Nord sees in two days. If you would rather read than guess, the Paris network explorer has a page for every line and every station.

Next Station Paris: the one you can play at a table

Next Station Paris (Blue Orange, 2024) is a flip-and-write board game where every player draws four metro lines across their own map of Paris, serving monuments and crossing the Seine at the right places. One to four players, about 25 minutes, and it plays solo. It is the only game here that builds network knowledge instead of testing it, and the only one you can put in front of someone who has never thought about the metro in their life.

The comparison

If you only take one thing away: play Paris de tête tonight for the score, then pick whichever daily game annoys you in the way you enjoy. There is also a Paris metro quiz if you want questions rather than puzzles, and notes on memorising the network if the percentages hurt. For the genre beyond Paris, see every metro game, sorted by family.