Games Like Bus Jam: Colour-Match Bus and Car Escape Puzzles to Play Next

If you like Bus Jam and want the next one, start with Crowd Express: Boarding Puzzle, also from Rollic Games, which keeps the colour-coded passengers and adds cars that have to be moved out of the way first. Bus Escape: Traffic Jam (ABI Games) turns the puzzle round, so the buses are the ones stuck in the jam and the passengers wait for you to free them. Bus Out: Crowd Jam! (Bigger Games) sends passengers past on a conveyor and asks you to have the right bus parked when they arrive. If you would rather not install anything, our free browser game Car Match is the same colour-match-and-escape logic on a flat grid, and Match Heist, our app, is the 3D version of it. One catch each, below.

What makes Bus Jam Bus Jam

Rollic’s listing puts it in one line: organise colourful passengers and match them with the right buses. In practice that is three puzzles stacked on top of each other. There is a crowd, and some of it is boxed in. There are buses, and each one only takes one colour. And there is the order: who you move now decides who is free when their bus pulls in. Get it wrong and the board clogs with people waiting for a bus that is not coming.

So the thing you actually like is probably one of two halves. One is the matching: colours going where they belong, a busload at a time. The other is the escape: working out which piece has to move before the one behind it can. The best alternatives keep both. The rest of this list keeps one half and tells you which.

How we chose

• Colour matching plus a jam. Every pick has to make you match something by colour while something else is in the way, or be an explicit half of that idea and say so.
• Vehicles, or at least passengers. That rules out a few good colour puzzles. Rollic’s own Color Block Jam (slide blocks to doors of the same colour) is the nearest miss, and Hexa Sort (Lion Studios Plus) is colour stacking with no traffic at all.
• A developer you can name. The bus genre is a hall of mirrors, so every pick names a studio you can check on the listing.
• Free to start. The apps are free with ads and in-app purchases; our browser games have no ads and nothing to buy.
• One limitation each. Ours too.

Side by side

Crowd Express is the closest thing to more Bus Jam

Rollic Games. Same publisher, same instinct. The listing promises colourful passengers matched to “color-coded buses”, but it adds a layer Bus Jam keeps simple: you “shuffle buses, cars, and passengers” to clear jam-packed stations, so the vehicles themselves are part of the jam. If you liked the boarding and want a little more to untangle around it, this is the smallest step sideways.

The limitation: being the closest also means it changes the least. It comes from the same studio with the same ads-plus-shop model, a leaderboard on top, and the listing says nothing about offline play. If Bus Jam had started to feel samey, this will too.

Bus Escape: Traffic Jam flips the puzzle so the buses are stuck

ABI Games (ABI GAMES PTE. LTD. on Google Play, ABI GLOBAL LTD. on the App Store). Here the jam is made of vehicles. The how-to-play on Google Play is plain about it: tap a vehicle and it goes in its one direction, “the parking slot is limited”, and each vehicle carries between four and eight passengers depending on its size. So you are freeing buses from gridlock and filling them with the right colour, and a bad order fills your parking with buses nobody can board. Of the third-party picks, it balances the two halves best. The Android listing also says you can play without an internet connection.

The limitation: boosters are written into the instructions themselves (“Stuck in jam? Power up a booster”), so expect the shop to be part of the difficulty curve. The name is also one of the most copied in the genre; more on that below.

Bus Out: Crowd Jam! puts the passengers on a conveyor

Bigger Games. This one moves the queue. Passengers “move along the conveyor” while a packed lot of buses waits below; you tap a bus to send it into an open parking slot and it fills with passengers of its colour as they pass. Parking is limited, so choosing the wrong bus blocks the one you need next. Timing matters most here, though the listing promises “no timer and no pressure”.

The limitation: it is Android only, as far as we could find; we found no App Store listing under its name or package. And “Bus Out” is a name it shares with a different game from a different studio, so read the developer line before you tap install.

Match Heist is our colour-match escape puzzle in 3D

Ours. Match Heist is a free 3D car match puzzle for iOS and Android. You tap any car you can reach, it goes into your tray, and three cars of the same colour clear. The tray only holds so many cars, so fill it before you match and the job is over. Cars block cars, which means the question is the same one Bus Jam asks: which one has to move first? Vera Voss plans the jobs, Ethan Rowe drives, Sir Wagsworth supervises from somewhere comfortable, and there are power-ups and limited-time events around the puzzle.

The limitation: there are no passengers and no buses. You are matching the vehicles themselves, so the “waiting for the right bus” tension becomes “waiting for the third red car”. It is also a free-to-play app with ads and in-app purchases, like the other apps on this list.

Car Match is the same rule in your browser, free

Also ours. Car Match is the free browser version of the Match Heist rule. Tap a car with a clear road to an exit and it drives into a parking lot with seven slots; three of a colour clear and hand their slots back; fill all seven without a set and the run is over. Mystery boxes and tunnels hide extra cars. There are 483 levels from Easy to Super Hard, no lives, no timer and nothing to buy, and an undo button for the tap you regret.

The limitation: it is a flat grid, not a 3D station, and nothing arrives on its own schedule. In Bus Jam the buses set the pace. In Car Match you set it, which makes it calmer and, for some players, less tense than they want. It also downloads its levels in batches, so offline you can finish the batch you are in and the next one needs a connection.

Getaway Garage is matching where everything moves at once

Ours again. Getaway Garage keeps the match-three-vehicles rule but changes how you move them: every swipe slides the whole garage, and each vehicle travels until it hits a wall, a barrier or another vehicle. Three identical vehicles in a row or column drive off. Nothing settles after a clear, so the gaps you leave become the lanes you use next.

The limitation: it has 20 levels. That is an evening, not a season, and it is the furthest pick here from Bus Jam’s feel, since you never move one piece on its own.

Car Parking is the escape half on its own

Ours, last. Car Parking is a Rush Hour-style unblock puzzle: slide parked cars and vans along their lanes until the gold car can drive out through the gate. Every one of the 240 graded levels is checked by a solver before you see it, and after level 240 it keeps generating full-difficulty decks. Unlimited undo, three hints per level, no timer.

The limitation: there is no colour matching at all. It is here for the player who realised the bit of Bus Jam they enjoy is untangling the crowd, and who would happily lose the buses to get more of that.

A warning about the names

Search “Bus Jam” on either store and Rollic’s game is only one of the results. Google Play also carries Bus Jam: Car Parking Games from Joymaster Puzzle Game Studio and Bus Jam 3D Puzzle from Skyjoy Games, and the App Store has a Bus Jam: Traffic Trouble from Gimica GmbH. “Bus Out” is a game from iKame Games (Zego on the App Store), which is not the same as Bigger Games’ Bus Out: Crowd Jam! above. “Bus Escape” turns up in at least two titles from two studios. Bus game naming works like bus route numbering: obvious, repeated, and not much help.

The fix takes two seconds. Read the developer line, not the icon. The Bus Jam this post is about says Rollic Games, and every pick above names its studio so you can check you have the right one.

Picking one

• If you want more Bus Jam with a little extra to untangle: Crowd Express: Boarding Puzzle, from the same studio.
• If you want the buses stuck instead of the passengers: Bus Escape: Traffic Jam from ABI Games.
• If you want the timing puzzle of a moving queue: Bus Out: Crowd Jam! from Bigger Games, on Android.
• If you want colour matching and blocked roads in 3D, with a crew: Match Heist.
• If you want it free in a browser tab, no ads: Car Match.
• If you want something stranger with the same three-of-a-kind rule: Getaway Garage.
• If you only liked the untangling: Car Parking.

The rule underneath all of it: if you miss the colours, pick a game that matches; if you miss the gridlock, pick one that makes you clear a path; if you miss both, Bus Escape and Car Match keep both in play. Car Match is free in your browser, so you can find out which half you miss before you install anything.