San Francisco transit games: Muni, BART and the rest

San Francisco has the most eccentric transit-games scene in America, which is fitting for a city where the same trip can involve a subway, a streetcar and a cable car pulled by a wire from 1873. Below: the games worth playing, and where mine fits. I make DailyMetro, whose San Francisco edition launches on September 15, 2026 and is already playable in early access.

The playable Bay Area set here is deliberately mixed: 108 stops across 13 services, covering Muni Metro's L, N and T, the F Market historic streetcars, all three cable car lines, plus the BART and Caltrain stations inside the city.

Routle: name the route from its shape

Routle is the local classic. It shows you the bare shape of one Muni route drawn on a white background and gives you five guesses to name it, with wrong answers accumulating in red until they form a skeleton map that quietly hints at where you are. About sixty routes are in the pool, from the 1 California to the T Third Street.

It was built in a single day by River Honer, a software engineer and urbanist, as an homage rather than a business; SFMTA later asked to host an accessibility survey link on it. The San Francisco Standard picked it up and now runs a version on its own site. It is the only game in this whole genre that tests bus-route literacy, which is a genuinely underrated skill.

The Muni personality quiz, and other local oddities

In summer 2025 a "which Muni line are you" quiz went genuinely viral in the Bay Area, walking you through a night out and assigning you one of sixteen lines. It is not a skill game and it does not pretend to be, but it belongs on the list, because it is the clearest evidence that people here treat transit lines as identity rather than infrastructure.

DailyMetro San Francisco: one stop a day, with clues

Mine. Every day there is one mystery stop, 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 neighborhood, which in this city is the most informative clue on the board. No cap on guesses, so you always finish the day, and fewer tries means a higher score. Connaisseur mode replaces the two easy clues with annual ridership and opening year.

There is also a Map mode: the stop sits marked on an empty map, and each miss reveals another layer, from the surrounding streets to the lines themselves. San Francisco is a particularly nasty Map mode, because the Muni Metro lines fan out from Market Street at angles that all look plausible until you have learned them.

The numbers behind the puzzles: the four Market Street subway stations (Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell and Civic Center) each serve seven services, the most anywhere in the set, and Embarcadero is the busiest at 18 million entries a year. The oldest stops in the data are cable car stops on the California line dating to 1878, and the newest are the 2023 Central Subway stations, Union Square/Market Street and Yerba Buena/Moscone. The San Francisco explorer has a page per line and per stop if you want to revise before launch day.

The comparison

Notably, Metro Memory has more than 25 city editions and San Francisco is not one of them, so the blank-map-recall corner of the genre is unoccupied here. If you want the full landscape, there is a tour of the genre by family, and a longer piece on how the Bay Area edition plays.