A small planet, and its first towns. They grew where the water
is: on rivers, beside lakes, under the rain. Now they want to grow into
cities, and a city can only be as big as what its people can reach.
Lay lines. Every zone a line serves can reach more jobs, so it
can hold more people, so it grows, so the line fills. Buy trains
to keep up: a full ride slows down, and the riders it can't carry are
stranded. Fares pay for the next line.
Cities eat. Food grows in the countryside and is sold in a
market: it goes where it fetches most after the carriage, so a
city that outgrows its farms pays more, eats less, goes hungry
and stops growing, and dear food draws farmers back to the land. Give a
line freight wagons and it carries food from the breadbaskets,
and ore from the mines (◆), cheaper than any cart. A full line
charges what its room is worth: the gap between the prices at its ends.
The food map shows where it grows and what it costs.
Shape a line as you go: tap an end stop to build from that end,
tap on the track to put a stop in between, tap a stop to pick it
and remove it. Loop joins the ends: no terminus to turn
back at, and no dead end. Lay a stop on another line's and it's an
interchange (◎): changing there takes a minute, not a walk out to
the street, and jobs gather round it.
The map gets finer where the city gets dense: a crowded zone
splits, and the city you planned for keeps turning into a bigger
one.
You hold a charter round your home city: build inside it. Carry
enough riders and you earn the right to buy a wider one, until the
whole planet is yours to build on. Prices rise as the world gets
richer, building through a dense city costs more, and the cities take
a growing cut of your fares.
A run is a century, 1900 to 2000, and it is scored against the
same planet without you: how many more people, how much more wealth,
how much better fed. From the 1910s the car speeds up the roads
every year, so your lines have a rival; track decides how
closely trains can follow (single track: one every 8 minutes) and how
fast they run, and upgrading it is how a busy line grows.
Drag to turn, pinch to zoom. Pick + line, then tap land to lay stops; tap on its track to add one between.