Mini Motorways

Mini Motorways (2019) is a sequencing strategy game that tasks you with planning a city road network. You lay down roads, traffic lights and motorways to ensure enough cars can get to the office buildings that pop up in your city as time passes. It's from the same developer as Mini Metro and slightly more complex, although it retains a simple aesthetic and moreish gameplay.

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You start with just a single colour-coded workplace and a few houses. Join them up and the traffic starts flowing. As things progress more houses and offices are added in different colours. Your simple road system now needs to cope with increased journeys that can crisscross inefficiently if you aren't careful. If things get too clogged up, the workers can't get through and it's game over.

There are three different ways to play: laid-back Endless Mode, Normal or the high-stakes Expert Mode. Endless mode offers a leisurely look at how to build a city transport system even after things have gone wrong. Normal mode sets you a challenge with periodic additions of roads, roundabouts, motorways and so on. Expert mode is similar but limits your ability to edit roads after you've set them in place.

The result is a game that looks beautiful and zen-like but soon brings you face-to-face with painful decisions and collapsing infrastructure.

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Our examiner, Jo Robertson, first checked Mini Motorways 5 years ago. It was re-examined by Thom Robertson and updated 3 months ago.