Mini Motorways has become one of the underrated puzzles in 2021 at par with Dorfromantik.
This is a minimalistic city puzzle game where your objective is to build an efficient road system inside randomly generated buildings using real-life city maps. You match residential networks to reach their business destinations without causing congestion.
The longer you survive in the game, the harder things get as more buildings spawn. The game’s over once one of the colored districts doesn’t reach their destinations on time.
In this quick guide, we’ll show you some tips and tricks in Mini Motorways so that you can avoid the frequent headaches that you’ll face as you plow through traffic.
You Don’t Need To Connect Every Building You See
At your first playthroughs of Mini Motorways, you might think that you need to connect every house to its matching business building destination — well, not always.
Sometimes the way buildings spawn doesn’t come in your favor so you have to do your best in adjusting to the situation.
If ever you encounter these kinds of situations where the buildings don’t spawn in areas you don’t expect, then there’s no need to force it in your road network.
Small business buildings denoted by a big square would usually need at least one or two houses to avoid the timer kicking in. The road puzzle becomes complex if the building suddenly upgrades to a big business indicated by a circular building.
Pay Attention To Motorways
The game’s called Mini Motorways for a reason and taking advantage of this type of road network will help you create faster routes for your color group.
Try to stack as many of these motorways as early as possible because these can help you in solving complex road connections later on.
Motorways are very helpful especially if buildings are deployed on the far side of the map. However, the disadvantage of having a Motorway is that you won’t be able to build over mountains on some maps so have spare tunnels at your disposal.
Ditch Traffic Lights, Roundabouts Are Your Friends
In the first minutes of your Mini Motorways puzzle session, you might get tempted in getting the Traffic Lights.
However, getting these frequently will make road management more difficult in the late game and even increase the risk of traffic congestion if your color network is all over the place.
So Roundabouts are your best bet if you want your cars to get to their destinations faster while solving congestion problems.
Place Unused Roads On The Map
This may sound absurd at first but this is actually one of the most helpful Mini Motorways tips that you can take advantage of.
Since structures spawn randomly, you could use these excess roads to block off areas so you’ll have a higher chance of getting better scores.
Feel free to remove the excess roads later on if it’s necessary. After all, you don’t get any penalties for removing roads in Mini Motorways.
Create A Separate Network For Each Color Group
In the first few minutes of the game, you’ll be indirectly guided on how colored cars and buildings interact with each other whenever you create a network. However, as you dive deeper into this road puzzle, you’ll be faced with plenty of obstacles.
So as early as now, have a mindset to keep road networks exclusive to one or two colors depending on the building placements.
If you see that a certain color group can be optimized with one Motorway network, then feel free to make the necessary adjustments.
Take Advantage Of The Timer Controls
This is one of the Mini Motorways tips that gets overlooked. Unless you’re challenging yourself to keep building while the timer’s running at twice the speed, there’s no need to panic!
If you become overwhelmed with what’s happening to the traffic, you can always pause the map and think carefully on which roads to optimize to avoid further bottlenecks in the future.
Once you’re comfortable with your optimized road network, then you can resume and observe where buildings will spawn next.
Take note of these hotkeys as well when controlling your timer:
- Space Bar pauses and resumes the map
- Left (decrease) and Right (increase) Arrow Keys control the map speed (1x or 2x)
And that wraps up our quick tips for Mini Motorways. Remember to take it easy and keep practicing until you’re able to beat your high scores.
If you have any other advice that you can give, feel free to leave them in the comments section.
