Boring Game

Boring Game is a transit-building simulation set in a voxel San Francisco Bay Area made from real map data (OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps and AWS terrain tiles). You plan a rail line, choose a design, push it through approvals, drive the tunnel boring machine and open the line. The catch is the one Bay Area transit actually faces: cost and time. On every line the target is to come in within 2× of what Poland would pay, in money and in years.

The missions

• The Portal: a 2.1 km tunnel from Caltrain at 4th and King to the Salesforce Transit Center's train box, which has stood empty since 2018. The official plan is $6.84 billion and early 2036, which the game puts at 18.7× Poland. (The game's joke: the makers of Fable 5.2 want a train to their fictional HQ by Salesforce Park.)
• Dumbarton to Meta: the tracks to Meta already exist and carry no passengers, and estimates grew from $50 million to $1.6 billion. Lay the rails.
• Googleplex spur: a fictional 2.6 km twin-bore tunnel from San Antonio Caltrain to Google. Allow homes at the stations so it pays.
• Silicon branch: a fictional 17 km branch off Caltrain for Meta and Google, with track, a viaduct and a short tunnel.
• Free build: the whole Bay, a trillion dollars and all the political capital you can spend.

Built on research

The costs, dates and funding are taken from real documents (SFCTA, TJPA and SamTrans reports, and Warsaw metro extensions for the Polish benchmark), with sources cited in the repo. The backlash posts that follow every spend of political capital are adaptations of real public comments against Bay Area housing and California rail. One environmental-review card, "A Fish, 100 Miles Away", says plainly that no real fine at that distance was found.

How it was built

Claude Fable 5.2 built it in Claude Code, directed by one person: 15 prompts (most of them dictated), about 15 hours over 3 days, about $700 at API prices. That came to 45,000 lines of TypeScript plus 21,000 lines of tests (757 unit tests and 54 end-to-end tests). The game shows the same figures on its title screen.

Credits

Made by jakozaur. The map data comes from OpenStreetMap, Overture Maps and AWS Terrain Tiles; see the repo's attribution file.

How a mission works

1. Plan: use the official alignment, or draw your own. Place stations and choose the design.
2. Approvals: Next decision (Space) runs the clock to the next gate or event card. Spend political capital on reforms along the way.
3. Build: launch the boring machine and drive it yourself, or leave it on autopilot. While a machine bores you can set the pace: Regular, Faster or Skip to end.
4. Open: fit-out and trains, then a scorecard and a receipt that compares your line with what Poland would have paid.

Any mission can be picked at any time, and progress autosaves. Continue on the title screen picks up where you left off.

The one tip that matters: reforms before tender

• Tender fixes the design and the contract prices. Reforms to procurement, staffing and utilities only lower the cost if you buy them before tender.
• In The Portal, tender comes about five months in. Your 200 political capital buys roughly six of the reforms that cut the cost, and nothing else.
• In the other missions, 160 capital buys four or five of the eleven reforms on offer before tender.
• Buy from the top of the reform sheet. The game's own tests show that buying from the top gets the cost under 2× Poland, while buying in list order or cheapest first doesn't.
• In Silicon branch, most of the calendar is permits, because the line starts from nothing. That's where a specustawa (a Polish-style special act that fast-tracks permits) earns its price.

More tips

• Googleplex spur and Dumbarton: the riders have to come from homes you allow around the stations, so don't skip the housing decisions.
• Dumbarton is surface rail on an existing right-of-way, the cheapest kind of railway there is, so it's the best mission for learning the approvals flow.
• Use Free build to try out reforms and alignments with no budget pressure. The receipt still tells you what Poland would have paid.

Controls

Key	Action
1 – 4 (or P, B, G, T)	Plan, station, dig and drive tools
Space	Run to the next decision
Esc	Put a tool away / close a panel
Ctrl + Z	Undo a plan edit
, / .	Step depth or brush size
Drag or W A S D	Pan the camera
Right-drag or Q / E	Rotate
Mouse wheel	Zoom

Driving the boring machine: W / S thrust, A / D steer, R / F pitch, Space autopilot, Esc leaves the machine.