A computer scientist playing a city builderby Taylor Stapleton

So, I have recently been playing a game entitled "Cities in Motion 2". The entire premise of the game is to take a simulated city (a very well simulated city) and build a mass transportation system for it. I have always been fascinated by transport and I love learning how things like trains work. So this game is perfect for me! I get to try insane mass transit ideas on an awesome engine and with no consequences. Inevitably, in any city you must have a central location where all the different forms of transportation come together to exchange passengers. I never realized how hard it can be to build a transit hub for millions of people to pass through. It's an optimization problem of the highest degree. Almost every design I try ends up having some kind of deadlock when there are too many vehicles passing through. The common city system will usually utilize buses, trolleys, trams, monorails , subways, and ferries. My latest design includes buses, trams, and monorails and after many iterations has yet to deadlock or even slow down. I'm very proud of its design so I thought I would share it here.

So if you are some kind of engineer and you are looking for fun puzzles and problems to solve on the weekends, I would highly recommend this game. I picked it up when it was full price at $30, but it commonly goes on sale on Steam as well. Even at full price I would say that it's really quite delicious.

p.s. -- This game does not include an auto-save feature. So unless you want to spend 6 hours building your first amazing transit system only to have your computer crash and leave you cursing the god who created the people that created this game without an auto-save feature, go ahead and set reminders for yourself to save your game now and then. :-)