🚌 Bus Jam

A bus escape puzzle you can play in your browser

Bus Jam is a free colour-sorting puzzle about a very busy bus stop. A crowd of passengers in coloured coats is squeezed into a plaza, and a line of coloured buses pulls up one at a time. Your job is to get every passenger onto the bus of their colour. It sounds simple, but passengers can only leave if nobody is standing in their way, and the bus at the stop only takes its own colour. Everyone else has to wait in the waiting bay, and it has just five spots.

Every tap is a little decision: send the red passenger now, or first clear the way to the blue ones that the next bus will need? Plan a few buses ahead and the whole crowd flows out neatly. Rush, and the waiting bay fills up with people nobody can take.

How Bus Jam works

The bus at the stop shows its colour on its side and on its sign. Each bus has three seats. When you tap a passenger with a clear path to the top of the plaza, they walk out: if they match the bus, they climb aboard and take a window seat; if they do not, they walk to the first free spot in the waiting bay. When a bus is full it drives off, and the next bus in the queue pulls in. Anyone in the waiting bay who matches the new bus walks straight over and boards, which can clear several spots at once.

Passengers who can walk out are bright and bob on the spot; passengers who are boxed in look faded. That makes it easy to see your choices, but the real puzzle is choosing the right order.

60 levels and a Daily Jam

The first levels are small crowds with two or three colours, so you can learn the rules. Later levels bring bigger plazas, up to seven colours, benches that block the way and mystery passengers shown as grey question marks, whose coat colour is only revealed once they can walk out. Every level is built from a seed and checked by a solver before you see it, so there is always a way through, even when it does not look like it.

The Daily Jam is one new puzzle each day, the same for every player. Clear it on consecutive days to grow your streak.

How the levels get harder

Bus Jam grows with you. Levels 1 to 9 are small plazas with two or three colours, where you mostly learn to read the bus queue. From level 10, every fifth level is a 🔥 hard level: the colours are shuffled much more deeply, so the passengers the next buses need are buried behind people who will not be picked up for a long time. On a normal level, sensible play is always enough: free whoever the next two buses need and you will get through. A hard level needs real planning, often three or four buses ahead, and it usually takes more than one try.

Benches arrive at level 4. They never move, so they turn the plaza into corridors, and a single passenger standing in a corridor can block a whole row. Mystery passengers arrive at level 14: you can see that someone is there, but not which bus they belong to until they can walk out, so keep a spare waiting spot when you open up a new corner of the crowd.

Stars, helpers and towns

Clearing a level earns one star. Clear it without using Undo or the extra spot for two stars, and clear it without ever filling the waiting bay for all three. If you do get stuck, the game offers help: three Undos per level take back your last moves, and one extra waiting spot gives you a sixth space. Stars unlock new towns to play in: Sunny City, Beach Town, Snowy Village and Night City.

Tips for clearing the jam

Look at the queue of buses at the top right, not just the bus at the stop: the next two colours tell you which passengers to dig out next. Use the waiting bay for passengers who are blocking someone you need, and try to keep at least two spots free. Passengers at the edges of the top row are often the easiest to free without opening up too much. When the next bus matches several waiting passengers, filling the current bus quickly can clear the bay in one go. And if you make a mistake, there is no shame in an Undo.

Colour symbols and keyboard play

Turn on Show colour symbols before you start and every passenger and bus gets a shape as well as a colour (circle, triangle, square, diamond, star, heart and cross), so the puzzle works for colour-blind players too. You can also play without a mouse: the arrow keys move a cursor around the crowd, Enter or Space sends the passenger under it, Z undoes and R restarts.

Free, safe and made for every device

Bus Jam runs in any modern browser on computers, Chromebooks, tablets and phones, with a portrait layout on small screens. There are no adverts inside the game, no accounts, no chat and nothing to buy, and your stars are saved only on your device. See the Parents & Safety page for more.

More bus and puzzle games

Drive the bus yourself in City Bus Simulator, untangle a car park in Parking Jam Escape, or find more brain teasers on the Puzzle Games page. Every bus game is on the Bus Games page.

Frequently asked questions