Because that is the mechanic, not bad luck. At the end of every week Railroot looks at which line carried the most passengers and places the new district beside it, most of the time. It is the whole idea of the game: the route you are proudest of is the one that attracts the load, so being good at Railroot creates the problem you then have to solve. The zoning stamp is the answer — arm it with G or the Zone button and tap an empty patch of the map, and the next district is built there instead.

Each rider carries a badge shaped like the stop they want to reach, and the network works out the route for them. They board the first tram that takes them a hop closer, change automatically wherever the map says to change, and get off at any stop with the right shape. You never route a person by hand — you build the graph and they walk through it. That is why a poorly connected map does not look broken, it just gets slower, and one queue creeps up week after week.

A jammed stop. Every stop can hold a queue, and if it stays over capacity long enough it overflows and the run ends — the end card names the shape that gave out. There is no health bar and no timer: the failure is always a crowd you did not have the capacity to move, which means every run ends with a legible reason. The warning ring around a stop fills up before it jams, so a run that ends is a run you were told about first.

Almost always, and that is why bridges are the scarcest thing in the game. A line can only cross the water where a bridge has been built, and bridges arrive as weekly cards, so a crossing is a decision rather than a right of way. Hills are stricter still — nothing crosses a hill, lines have to go around, and in Ringhill the hill is in the middle of town on purpose. Two Banks turns the same idea into a strait that splits the map in half.

A run is a town, and a town lasts as long as your network holds — roughly half an hour once you know what you are doing, with new abilities and new stop shapes still arriving in the last third. Passengers carried across all your runs unlock the other two towns, Two Banks and Ringhill, which are laid out around different terrain rather than being the same map made harder. Coins from finished runs buy extra zoning stamps and a permanent second starting line.

Yes, and it was built for one thumb first. Laying a line is a drag from one stop to another, picking a line is a tap on a colour, and adding a tram or a zoning stamp is a tap on a button — there is nothing that needs two hands or a keyboard. On a desktop the same actions have keys: 1 to 4 for lines, T for a tram, G for zoning, U to undo and P to pause. It is free, runs in the browser with no download and no account, and your progress is saved on the device you play on.