How to Beat Hard Bus Fever Party! Levels

1. The lot is a distraction; the queue is the level

Bus Fever Party! draws your eye to the parking lot, because that is where you tap. But the lot never decides whether you win. The passenger queue above it does. Every bus you release either boards the group at the front of the queue and disappears, or parks in a boarding bay and waits. The bays are the only scarce resource on the board, and the queue is the only thing that frees them.

So the first thing to do on any hard level is ignore the buses and read the queue: which colour is at the front, which is second, and roughly how far back the rarest colours sit. On Level 100 pink does not appear until deep in the line, so the pink bus that sits invitingly in the lower-left corner is a trap for the first forty taps.

2. Treat every bay as a loan you have to repay

When a bus parks in a bay it stays there until its colour reaches the front of the queue. On easy levels that happens within a few taps. On hard levels a colour can be forty passengers away, which means the bay is gone for most of the level.

Two rules follow. First, never have more than one loan outstanding for a colour that is far back in the queue. Second, keep at least one bay empty at all times, because the moment you need to park a bus to free a lane and cannot, the level is over. Level 75 shows the failure clearly: releasing the yellow and red buses in the middle stage fills all eight bays before cyan and pink have cleared, and the board locks with plenty of buses still movable.

3. Peel from the outside in

Buses only travel forward in the direction they face, and a blocked bus does nothing when tapped. On the diamond and butterfly layouts that dominate the later levels, the buses on the perimeter point outward and always have a lane; the buses in the core face other buses and cannot move until the perimeter is gone.

That gives you a default order when nothing matches the queue: release the outermost bus that opens a lane toward a colour you need soon. Level 120 is a multi-layered diamond where the whole solve is peeling layers, and Level 82, one of the two expert levels, is a butterfly whose wings must come off before the double centre column can move.

4. Vertical before horizontal

Inside a cluster, a horizontal bus needs an empty column to turn into before it can leave; a vertical bus only needs the lane straight ahead. Clearing the vertical buses first therefore unlocks more of the board per tap than clearing horizontal ones. The 37-bus grid on Level 9, the first level rated hard, is where this stops being optional.

5. Know when a full set of bays is a move, not a mistake

There is one exception to rule two. When several bays hold the same colour and that colour reaches the front of the queue, every one of those buses boards in turn and the bays empty in a chain. On Level 62, the other expert level, the route deliberately fills the bays mid-game to trigger exactly that chain. The difference between this and a loss is that every parked bus is a colour that is about to come up, not one that is forty passengers away.

6. The VIP Spot is for deadlocks, not speed

Thirteen of the 136 routes on this site use the VIP Spot. In every case the bus it pulls out was boxed in on all sides while its colour sat at the head of the queue and the bays were full. If you find yourself reaching for it earlier than that, you released something you should have left alone two or three taps ago. Level 46, at 120 taps the longest route we have published, saves it for the very last blocked red bus.