Mini Motorways Guide: Tips, Cheats, and Strategies

Mini Motorways launched alongside Apple Arcade this week, and got us all hooked to our phones in a way we haven’t experienced since Mini Metro dominated our lives.

This spiritual successor plays similarly but provides its own challenges. You have to help direct traffic between driver’s homes and warehouses, ensuring traffic remains smooth as your city grows.

As you progress, you’ll receive handy power-ups, including new road tiles, traffic lights, motorways, and more. In this guide, we’re going to help you get a massive high score by explaining how it all works, providing tips and tricks, and answered any frequently asked questions.

Mini Motorways – How it Works:

The basic premise in Mini Motorways is simple: create roads between different coloured car’s homes and warehouses of the same colour. In the beginning, this is very easy, as you often only have a single colour to contend with and everything is placed close to each other.

Quite quickly though, your city will grow into a bustling metropolis, featuring numerous different coloured cars and warehouses to connect to your city. You’ll face your biggest enemy: congestion, and have to draw up your roads from scratch to ease it, redirecting traffic from the busiest spots.

Fortunately, as you progress you’ll unlock new mechanics that can help you with this. You’ll get bridges, allowing you to redirect traffic over water, serving as either a shortcut or an alternative route, traffic lights, and motorways.

The latter is an absolute godsend, allowing you to create a direct route between distant locations over the road. Not only that, but your cars can travel at a greater speed on these roads.

You get an upgrade once per week, along with fresh new road tiles allowing you to create even more roads. Pick your upgrade wisely, as you’ll have to wait a considerable amount of in-game time to get another one.

Finally, you get a point each time a car successfully makes a collection at a warehouse. The aim of the game is to get as high a score as possible, so keep traffic flowing smoothly.

The game ends if any of your warehouses get too full. You can see their capacity by checking the number of pips above each warehouse. If any of them turn into a big red circle that slowly fills up, it means that your warehouse has overfilled capacity, and you’ll need to quickly find a way to get more traffic of the same colour to the warehouse.

Mini Motorways: Tips, Cheats, and Strategies

• Try and create the shortest distance between warehouse and home: You want to allow your cars to make their pickups with as much ease as possible to ensure the warehouses don’t overflow. To achieve this, focus on creating roads with as short a distance as possible, rather than making them look nice.
• Limit the need for different coloured cars to drive on the same road: This isn’t always possible – particularly in the later game – but try and limit the need for different coloured cars to drive on the same road, as this just creates more congestion. Redirect different coloured cars across bridges or motorways if possible, or just cut that particular colour off from the road.
• Traffic lights are useless in their current iteration: We’ve found no use for traffic lights in their current iteration. Mini Motorways tips claim that they’re great for easing congestion, but we’ve found they just slow everyone down and make it far worse. Instead, look for the telltale signs of congestion and try and redirect traffic before it becomes a problem. Don’t bother with traffic lights.
• Motorways are a godsend: Learn to love motorways, as they’re an absolute godsend. In the mid to late-game, you’ll find a lot of houses pop up on the opposite side of your city to the warehouses, which is where motorways come in handy. Rather than have these vehicles cross the entirety of the city, creating far more congestion, just connect the suburb to the warehouse directly via a motorway. Simple.
• Move motorways to direct traffic towards a full warehouse: If you find a warehouse is struggling, buy yourself some time by connecting a ton of same-coloured cars to it via a motorway. Provided you have spare road tiles, you can move your motorways at any point, so use them. We also recommend using this as an opportunity to reconfigure your roads to prevent the same problem from happening again.
• Create roads where you don’t want houses: Provided you have spare road tiles, you can place them in the spots that you don’t want houses or warehouses to spawn. You can’t have two objects in the same tile, so this effectively creates a block. If you’re going to use this strategy, it’s worth requesting more road tiles as your bonus power-up each week.
• As soon as you spot congestion, aim to ease it: Prevention is the best cure in Mini Motorways, as by the time a huge congestion problem has built up, it’s usually very difficult to ease it. During the early game when you don’t have an awful lot to do, just watch your roads. Which ones are getting driven on the most, and which the least? Do you occasionally see cars having to wait to turn down roads? This is a sign that congestion will hit pretty hard later on, so try and prevent it by redirecting traffic now to prevent a bigger problem later.

Glen Fox

Head of Editorial

Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.