It is up to you to keep things running smoothly and efficiently so everyone can get to where they need to go in a timely manner. However, as the game progresses there will be more stations and variables to consider. At first, it will be easy considering that there aren’t very many stations. It's supply and demand, and I'm getting everything I want.The overall objective is to make the largest, most efficient metro system possible. This is something economists would no doubt be delighted to hear - to an economist everything is economics - but urban planning really is. You're an economist in these games, is what I'm not-so-subtly implying. but naturally, like with Motorways, the randomness of what station appears where, where people appear and what they want, is the challenge. Every line should ideally have access to every type of stop - circle, triangle, square, diamond, star, curvy diamond thingy, etc. In Metros it's diversification, egalitarianism.

You want one big motorway going from all the blue houses to all the blue factories, if you can, with minimal interference from the greens who want to go somewhere else. In Motorways it's about specification, and division of labour. The limits here are the number of different lines.īut the real difference is strategy. Nowhere is a beginning or an end, for that reason - every station both origin and destination - and a Metro line can technically have infinite length, as opposed to the limited roads of Motorways. Rather than going from houses to offices or factories, the little people of this world appear as shapes at stations, which must get to other stations of the corresponding shape. The concept is the same, just with lots of little, structural differences. or Tokyo, but the Euro-starkness of Metro is a fine replacement. If you're like me, you might have come to Mini Metro backwards, via the also-special Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club's follow-up urban planner that's been on Arcade for a little while already. Bringing it to the subscription service is a sign Apple gets it. It's what Apple Arcade is all about, selling mobile gaming as something more than a vehicle for toilet-break microtransactions (cleverclogs will tell you it always has been, if you knew where to look, but the volume of guff does make that old attitude forgivable). This is the mobile game, simple and clear and immaculately well-suited to the platform. This is why subway maps make for a perfect video game, and Mini Metro - now Mini Metro+, with a few enhancements made to it for its arrival on Apple Arcade - is the perfect example. Compared to every other kind of public transport map, a tube map is as simple to look at - but it has to have been made by a genius. You know the sort - made of wood, a bit tactile, and always passively educational, the kind designed by friendly faces in white coats that do want you to have fun, but also develop very specific parts of your brain while you're doing it. I look at London's tube map and see a kind of Scandi children's toy. Much of it is just in the looks: the minimalism and the weirdly playful colours. There's a special elegance to subway maps.

Mini metro old