Mini Motorways is a game of simplicity and entropy. You are given a graphically modest geographic map from a bird’s eye view of a famous city. These maps have basic features like mountains, rivers, lakes, coasts and islands. For example, Tokyo features the Sumida river and the bay. The game will spawn buildings and garages housing cars. The buildings will generate markers (like a waypoint on a map) and the cars need to reach the building, pick up the marker and return it to their garage. Each building has a color and will spawn corresponding garages. It is up to the player to lay out roads, tunnels, bridges and motorways to connect the cars to their destinations. The player is also given two tools to mitigate traffic, roundabouts and omniscient traffic lights. There are no accidents in this world of perfect drivers, but there are limitations on resources and time intervals in which you receive them.
Mini Motorways is about strategy. As time goes on, you will have more markers to obtain, buildings will generate them faster and less space to work with. At some point, you will have intersecting roads and further distances between the markers and their obligated delivery vehicles. There will be traffic. This, you must accept. In the end, your cars will not reach their destinations fast enough, and when the markers build up, you will reach a fail point. The player has the benefit of stopping time (and speeding it up) to make the appropriate changes. Resources can be rearranged and recouped at any time. But the end is always the same. Doom.
As the city population, and building count continue to rise, your space will grow more limited and eventually the city will halt as there is no space to move. One could look at this game being about high scores. The game offers you a screenshot of your achievements so that you can share and even leaderboards to weigh your achievements against others. That is a time honored tradition in this art space, but I found something more. I learned to let go.
My natural inclination was to get the highest score possible. Keep all the cars running. Efficiently. Isn’t that what strategy games are about? Once I realized this was an impossibility I looked to victory in the leaderboards. Winning might mean reaching the top 10% performers on each map, but I found that the odds were stacked too high against me. I can’t take on the world. But … how else could I win? Did I have to win? Is that why I play games? I had no say in it. I had to give in to entropy. I had to allow myself to enjoy the random, the chaos and make my little bit of order while I could. What else is there anyway?
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