Over time, more buildings and houses will appear. As you connect them with roads, traffic will become congested. You have some special features to manage traffic such as like traffic lights, roundabouts, motorways (so that cars can bypass traffic and take a speedy express route), bridges to cross water, and tunnels to go through mountains.
If too many pins accumulate on a building (because not enough cars are getting to the building), a timer starts. If you don't manage to bring down the pin count in time, you die. Well, you don't die, but the game ends. The goal is to score as many trips as possible. This is a resource management sim in that you have a limited allotment of roads and special features. Eventually, you will get overwhelmed and die. But if your score is high enough, you unlock challenge modes for the map and possibly other maps. There are leaderboards for each map as well as daily and weekly challenges.
I like this game a lot, and think pretty much everyone should try it. It's fun to watch the cars get to their destinations using the roads you placed, and to relieve traffic snarls when they happen. But to me, the appeal is temporary. The gameplay experience is pretty similar from map to map. If you play it for a long time, it's because you're trying to earn every achievement or are just hooked to the calm puzzle vibe. Personally, after playing a few maps, I don't feel the need to play the rest. I might want to play again in the future, but I'll buy it on PC rather than play it on iPad again. Road placement is kind of tricky on the iPad.
Here are some of my cities. The big red pins show the buildings that got overwhelmed and made me die. My score for Beijing put me in the top 15%. [pete rock smilie]
