Live the Maddening Life of a Traffic Engineer With a $3 Game

The air sings with four-letter words. The iPad sits stoic as fingers poke, jab, and prod at its screen. Traffic engineering, it turns out, is a difficult job, even when you're working in a fantasy "city" made up of nothing but one office building and a solitary tree.

This is the world of Freeways, a new release from independent game maker Justin Smith, who owns Captain Games. The objective is simple enough: build a road network that connects a series of highways and buildings. When you've finished, you'll be scored on three metrics: the average speed of cars on your network, how much concrete you used to build it, and how easy it is for drivers to get from one point to another.

You can make roundabouts, standard intersections, even send one road over another. But plan carefully. Too many merges and you slow everything down. Too many interchanges and you waste money on concrete. Too many intersections and you risk gridlock. Or, as the game puts it when everything grinds to a halt, "Jammed!"