STM Late-Night Dispatcher

You Are the STM at 12:30 AM

Every weeknight at half past midnight, an invisible logistics machine kicks into gear under Montreal. The last metro trains begin their final loop across the Orange and Green lines, picking up the last bartenders, dishwashers, club kids, festival workers, and McGill grad students whose seminars somehow ran until 11:45pm. STM Late-Night Dispatcher is a free browser strategy game that puts you in the control room. You have until 1am. Don’t strand anyone.

This is the first thinking game in the Montreal Tips arcade. Unlike Pelle Boy (the snow plow chase) or Bagel Run (the bike-courier sprint), Bagel Boy is a top-down dispatcher game: click a train, click a station, the train heads there. Passengers board automatically when a train going their direction stops at their platform. Your job is to read the map, anticipate where the next crowd will appear, and minimize the number of people who get stranded when the last train leaves.

Qu'est-ce qui fait de Montréal une ville si particulière ?

How to Play

The controls are dead simple. The strategy is not.

• Click a train (rounded rectangle on a colored line) to select it. A yellow ring will appear.
• Click any station on the same line to dispatch the train there. The train will roll forward, stop at every intermediate station, and idle at the destination.
• Passengers auto-board when a train stops at their station and is moving toward where they need to go. They auto-deboard at their destination.
• Each passenger has a colored dot that shows the line of their destination station. Orange dot = they’re going to an Orange-line stop.
• If they need to switch lines, they’ll get off at a transfer station (Berri-UQAM or Lionel-Groulx) and wait for the other line’s train.

The wrinkle: trains don’t move continuously, they move only when dispatched. An idle train sitting at a station while passengers pile up is wasted capacity. The trick is to keep all four trains in motion — two on Orange, two on Green — and to anticipate where the next crowd will appear.

The Real STM Last-Train Schedule

The Montreal metro system runs from roughly 5:30am to 12:30am on weeknights, with the last train extending to 1:00am on Fridays and Saturdays. The Yellow Line (to Longueuil) and the Blue Line (to Saint-Michel) have slightly shorter hours, while the Orange and Green lines anchor the late-night service. According to STM data, on a typical Friday night roughly 25,000 trips happen between midnight and the last train — the equivalent of running an evening rush hour into the dead of night.

The system officially has 68 stations across 4 lines, but the busiest hour for stranding tends to fall right between 12:40am and 12:55am — when last calls at bars line up with the last train. Berri-UQAM, the central transfer station, sees more passengers per hour during that window than at any other time of day. We compressed that pressure into 90–120 seconds of in-game time.

Network Notes

• Orange Line: 21 stations from Henri-Bourassa in the north to Cote-Vertu in the west, looping through downtown via Berri-UQAM and Lionel-Groulx.
• Green Line: 22 stations from Angrignon in the southwest to Honore-Beaugrand in the east, crossing downtown at McGill, Place-des-Arts, Berri-UQAM.
• Transfer stations: Berri-UQAM (Orange + Green) and Lionel-Groulx (Orange + Green) — yellow circles on the map.
• The Yellow Line (to Longueuil) and Ligne bleue (to Snowdon) are deliberately omitted in this version to keep the game playable in 90 seconds.

Strategy Tips From a Former Night Dispatcher

• Don’t park trains at endpoints. Idle trains at Henri-Bourassa or Honore-Beaugrand earn nothing. Keep them in constant motion toward Berri-UQAM, where most passengers tend to flow.
• Use one train per direction. On the Orange line, have one train shuttling north-of-Berri (Jean-Talon, Mont-Royal, Sherbrooke), and the other shuttling south-of-Berri (downtown, Lionel-Groulx).
• Watch for the red pulse. Passengers who’ve been waiting more than 20 seconds get a red pulsing ring. They’re about to time out.
• Transfers are slow. A passenger who needs to switch lines counts as two trips. Prioritize same-line passengers when capacity is tight.
• Capacity is 6 per train. A full train can’t pick up more passengers — get them to a destination station before re-loading.

STM Dispatcher FAQ

More Montreal Games

STM Late-Night Dispatcher is a free fan-made game made with love for Montreal. Not affiliated with the Societe de transport de Montreal.