Traffic

Traffic hands over exactly one power: let an approaching car go, or hold it. That sounds almost too thin to be a game until vehicles start arriving on all four roads at once, at which point the simple choice becomes something you can get wrong every second.

The real object of management is not the car in front of you but the queue stacking up behind it. Hold one too long and the ones following pile into a knot that cannot be untied in time. Players who last release in short alternating bursts rather than opening one road wide, because keeping every direction trickling slowly is safer than clearing one side completely.

Pressure does not come from the speed of the cars; it comes from sheer volume climbing until hand and eye fall out of step. Most runs end because a single vehicle was missed in a corner nobody was watching, not because of any obviously bad call.