How to Play RouteQ
The daily delivery route puzzle. Three stops, one start, real streets — build the fastest loop you can and chase five-star efficiency.
Play today's puzzle →The rules
Every day RouteQ picks a real city and drops a driver at a start point with three delivery stops waiting nearby. Your job is simple to state and hard to do perfectly: hit all three stops and return to start, in whatever order makes the loop fastest.
You move by clicking. Each click steers your vehicle up to 500 meters along the road network, snapping to real streets through Mapbox. You cannot cut across buildings, hop blocks, or teleport — you drive where cars can actually drive. The 500-meter cap per click is what makes RouteQ a game instead of a map-drawing exercise; every turn is a decision.
When you have visited all three stops and come back within range of the start point, the puzzle submits. Your total drive time is compared against the optimal ordering for that city and that time of day. The ratio is your efficiency.
Scoring and stars
- Five stars — 98 to 100 percent efficiency. Essentially tied with the optimal route.
- Four stars — 95 to 97 percent. You picked the right ordering and drove it cleanly.
- Three stars — 90 to 94 percent. Good ordering, a few suboptimal turns.
- Two stars — 80 to 89 percent. Either the wrong ordering or a lot of wasted driving.
- One star — below 80 percent. Still counts as completed for your streak.
Strategy tips
- Plan before you click. With three stops there are only six possible orderings; usually two of them look obviously bad and one looks obviously good. Check the candidates before committing.
- Stops that cluster should be consecutive. Visiting two nearby stops back-to-back almost always beats sandwiching a far stop between them.
- Remember the return leg. The loop ends where it started. Picking an order that leaves your last stop close to home saves more time than shaving corners on the middle segments.
- Beware one-way streets and rivers. A route that looks shorter on a straight line can be much slower if it forces a long detour to find a bridge or a legal turn.
- Do not overshoot. Because each click is capped at 500 meters, breaking long segments into two clean clicks is faster than one click that has to re-route around a miss.
- Time of day matters. The optimal route is computed with the puzzle's departure time baked in, so rush-hour puzzles may reward routes that avoid the worst arterials, not just the shortest ones.
Difficulty tiers
RouteQ marks each daily puzzle as easy, medium, or hard. Easy puzzles are usually grid cities with stops that cluster in one direction. Medium puzzles spread the stops further and introduce a one-way street or two. Hard puzzles drop you in a dense historic core, an island, or a city split by a river — where the obvious visual ordering is often the wrong one.
FAQ
How do you play RouteQ?
RouteQ drops a real city each day with three delivery stops scattered across its streets. You click on the map to drive turn-by-turn, snapping to real roads via Mapbox. Hit all three stops, return to where you started, and your total drive time is compared to the optimal solution.
How is RouteQ scored?
Your efficiency is your optimal time divided by your actual time, as a percentage. 98 percent or better earns five stars. 95 to 97 percent earns four stars. 90 to 94 percent earns three. 80 to 89 earns two. Anything lower still counts as completed, but only one star.
What is the optimal route?
The optimal route is the fastest possible ordering of the three stops plus the return to start, computed against real-time-of-day traffic and road speeds. Solving it is a three-stop traveling-salesman problem, which means there are only a handful of valid orderings to compare.
Why can I only drive short distances per click?
Each click can move your vehicle at most 500 meters along the road network. The cap forces you to think about turns and side streets instead of warping across the city in one jump. You are effectively driving block by block.
Do I have to visit the stops in order?
No. You pick the order. That is the whole puzzle. The optimal ordering depends on the geometry of the city and the traffic on each segment, so the obvious clockwise loop is not always right.
When do new RouteQ puzzles drop?
Midnight Eastern every day. Same puzzle for every player worldwide so scores are comparable.
Is RouteQ free?
RouteQ is currently in beta and available to Premium members. Other daily games on the site, including SkyQ, AirportQ, PassportQ, and RailQ, are free to play with no account required.
What cities are in RouteQ?
A rotating pool of major cities worldwide. Each day features a different metro with its own street grid, traffic pattern, and difficulty tier. Some days are easy grids like Phoenix; other days are tangled old cores like Paris or Istanbul.
What is the best RouteQ strategy?
Before clicking, look at all three stops together and mentally test the three possible orderings. Favor visiting stops that cluster near each other consecutively. Watch for one-way streets and river crossings that force long detours. The return trip to start is part of the time budget, so do not end your route far from where you began.