Beginner walkthrough · Line-drawing strategy

Mini Metro: a city that gets ahead of you

You draw underground lines between stations with a finger, and passengers ride them. New stations keep appearing. That is the whole game, and it is deceptively hard, because the city grows faster than any network you can draw and the losing condition creeps up on you quietly.

Type

Real-time network-building strategy

Session

Ten to thirty minutes per city

Controls

Drag between stations to draw a line; drag an endpoint to extend

Learning curve

Understood in one city, mastered over many

Played one-handed

No — two hands, ideally on a larger screen

Before you start

A pale map with a few stations on it, drawn as simple shapes — circle, triangle, square. Passengers appear at stations as small shapes, and each wants to reach a station of that shape. You draw lines; trains run along them; passengers get where they are going.

Time runs continuously, which makes this the only game on this site you cannot pause and think through. It is also the only one where a session runs to half an hour.

The first run, beat by beat

Draw one line joining three or four stations of different shapes. Do not try to be clever — an early network only needs to connect the shapes that exist.

Watch the queues. A station with passengers stacking up is telling you exactly where your network is failing, and it is the only feedback the game gives. When a queue at one station gets long enough, that station overcrowds, and enough overcrowding ends the game.

Each week you are offered a new asset — a carriage, a tunnel, a new line. Take carriages early, not lines. A longer train on an existing route relieves pressure immediately; a new line takes minutes to matter.

The failure you will hit first is a single line that visits every station. It feels efficient and it is the worst possible shape: one slow loop, every passenger riding half the city to get anywhere.

What to expect in your first hour

Two or three cities lost around the fifteen-minute mark, each to one overcrowded interchange you did not notice. That is the intended lesson and there is no way to skip it.

Once you start splitting traffic across separate lines and using interchanges deliberately, cities start lasting. The maps then vary the constraint — rivers needing tunnels, sprawling suburbs — but the underlying skill does not change.

Six habits worth building early

• Carriages before new lines. More capacity on a working route beats a new route almost every time in the first ten minutes.
• Never build one line through everything. It looks tidy and it is the commonest way to lose.
• Watch queues, not trains. The stacking passengers are the only warning you get before an overcrowd.
• Put special shapes on more than one line. A rare shape served by a single route makes that route a bottleneck for the whole map.
• Redraw without regret. Lines can be rerouted at any time at no cost, and beginners treat them as permanent when they are not.
• Keep lines short. Two short lines crossing at an interchange move more people than one long line touching the same stations.

Is it for you?

If you like systems and do not mind losing to one you did not understand yet, it is the most rewarding game on this site. It is also the most demanding of your attention — there is no stopping to think.

It will not suit a five-minute gap, and it is genuinely awkward on a small phone. If you want the same drawing instinct in something you can put down mid-move, try the Airplane walkthrough here instead.

About this page. The Game Lantern is an informational site about mobile games. Mini Metro is described here as free-to-play entertainment: it is played purely for fun, there is no financial element of any kind, nothing of monetary value can be paid in or taken out, and no prizes are involved. Any scores or counters mentioned exist only inside the game. We have no commercial or contractual relationship with any publisher or developer whose game is named on this page.