Mini Metro

Mini Metro reduces building a transit network to the bare essentials: the player drags lines between stations of various shapes with a finger, adds trains and carriages, and tries to keep a growing city connected before some station overflows with waiting passengers and the game ends, all while new stations keep appearing at an unpredictable pace. Purely touch-based controls — dragging, reshaping routes, moving lines between stations — make Mini Metro one of the most natural strategy games ever made for mobile, since a finger replaces a pencil on a paper metro map.

The New Zealand studio built the game on minimalist graphics: stations are geometric shapes, lines are colored strokes, and no textures or details distract from the core of the game, which is planning and gradually adapting the network to the growing demands of the city. Each city's procedurally generated map ensures no playthrough looks the same, and ambient music that reacts to what's happening on the map and speeds up as traffic increases rounds out a meditative yet tense atmosphere as network collapse draws near.

It's a paid game with no ads or microtransactions, featuring an endless mode as well as daily challenges, so it can be played repeatedly without rushing, or just for a few minutes a day between other obligations. After its success on mobile it was also released on computers and consoles, but touch controls remain closest to how the game was designed to be played.

Why play it: For fans of elegant strategy and planning who will appreciate minimalist graphics and an ad-free game they can return to anytime for a few minutes.