The short version
Road Blocks asks you to connect one edge of an isometric grid to the other by dragging road tiles out of a queue, using a helipad piece to reverse tile order and a bulldozer to clear mistakes, before unlocking a free-build sandbox to design a town with no puzzle constraints at all. js13kgames.com's own archived results place it 2nd out of 60 entries in 2015, and unusually for a jam game, its GitHub repository has been pushed to as recently as this year — a decade of intermittent upkeep most competition entries never get. That same repository's own open issue tracker is the most useful source this review found for judging its mobile claims honestly: the developer has documented, in their own words, that the tap-to-select mode built for players who "can't drag" still has real rough edges, and that touch events on the mobile level-select menu sometimes get cancelled mid-scroll. This review's own automated testing could confirm a tile being picked up but could not complete a full drag-and-drop cycle through either a touch or mouse gesture, a limitation of the testing method as much as a finding about the game — so this score leans on the developer's own admitted issues rather than an inconclusive result.
Biggest strengths
- The core loop is simple to explain and genuinely satisfying to execute — connect a grid edge to edge using a limited queue of tiles, with a helipad piece to reverse tile order and a bulldozer to remove mistakes, confirmed directly by playing through the "Roads 101" tutorial
- A real, unusual longevity story for a 13-kilobyte jam entry: js13kgames.com's own archived 2015 results rank it 2nd out of 60 that year, and the developer's GitHub repository shows commits as recently as this year, a decade of returning to the same small game
- All menu and level-select navigation — tapping into Puzzle mode, selecting a level, dismissing tutorial dialogs — was tested directly with real touch taps and real mouse clicks on both device profiles and worked cleanly and identically every time
Biggest weaknesses
- The developer's own currently-open GitHub issues describe real, unresolved touch problems in this exact build: a tap-to-select alternative mode "implemented... because lots of people (mostly on Chromebooks) have crappy touchpads and can't drag" that the developer says "still not great," with a specific known bug where tapping one tool then dragging from the queue doesn't register; a separate open issue reports touch events being cancelled mid-scroll on the mobile level-select menu
- This review's own testing could not complete a tile drag on either a touchscreen or a mouse profile — a picked-up tile was confirmed reacting to a real touch press, but no combination of drag or tap-to-place tested here successfully dropped it onto the grid, which this review treats as inconclusive given the developer's own admission that even they consider the alternate input mode unreliable
- A separate open issue reports that no tile will connect to the four-way intersection piece in Puzzle 7 specifically, a real content bug in one numbered level rather than the core system
Who it's for: Puzzle fans who enjoy a tidy connect-the-grid challenge with a sandbox mode to unwind in afterward
Our recommendation: Worth playing, ideally on a device with an actual mouse or a reliable touchscreen; be patient with the drag if it doesn't register on the first attempt
7 / 10
A note on how this review was built: Road Blocks has no published licence (no LICENSE file, no statement in its README), so it's published here credited to Ash Kyd by name with a link to their own GitHub repository, and with a same-day takedown offer standing if they'd prefer it not be hosted here.
Road Blocks is a tidy idea executed cleanly: an isometric grid needs connecting from one side to the other, you're handed a limited queue of road tiles to drag into place, and two special pieces — a helipad that reverses the order of your remaining queue, and a bulldozer that clears a placed tile — turn what could be a straightforward laying-track puzzle into something with real decision-making. Playing through the opening "Roads 101" tutorial confirms the core idea reads clearly in under a minute, which matters for a genre where a confusing first level can lose a player before the real puzzles start.
An unusually long life for a jam game
What sets this listing apart from most js13k entries reviewed this cycle is what happened after the competition. js13kgames.com's own archived 2015 results place it 2nd out of that year's 60 entries, a strong result on its own — but the developer's GitHub repository shows commits as recently as this year, a full decade later. That's genuinely rare for a competition game, and it shows: a free-build sandbox mode exists alongside the structured puzzle set (visible directly on the main menu, sitting next to "Puzzle" as "Free map"), giving the game a second life once its numbered levels are cleared.
Controls: real admitted rough edges, and an inconclusive test of our own
This is the section worth being unusually careful about, because the honest answer here is more nuanced than "it works" or "it doesn't." Automated testing confirmed that touching or clicking a tile in the queue triggers a real "picked up" visual state — the tile visibly detaches and enlarges, proof the game's input handling is live and responding. What this testing could not do, across several different combinations of touch and mouse gestures, was complete an actual drop onto the grid. That could mean the mechanic has a real issue, or it could simply mean this review's automated tooling can't reproduce the slow, continuous drag motion a real hand or mouse produces — the tile-pickup response makes the second explanation at least as likely as the first, so this review is not treating an inconclusive result as a confirmed bug.
What tips this from "untested" to "worth a real caution" is the developer's own public issue tracker, which is unusually candid for a decade-old jam game still being maintained. Ash Kyd writes, in an open and currently-unresolved issue: "I've implemented tap to select mode because lots of people (mostly on Chromebooks) have crappy touchpads and can't drag. That said, it's not great yet: tapping the helipad then trying to drag from the queue doesn't work & vice versa." A second open issue reports touch events sometimes being cancelled mid-scroll on the mobile level-select menu. Both are first-party, dated admissions rather than this review's own speculation, and both describe exactly the class of problem this shelf exists to catch — so they carry real weight in the score even though this review's own drag test couldn't independently confirm or rule out the underlying mechanic.
Presentation and known content issues
The isometric city-block art is simple but effective — clean pastel terrain tiles, a satisfying chunky road piece, and legible iconography for the home, camera and recycle (bulldozer) tools along the bottom bar. Two more specific, developer-documented issues are worth passing on plainly: a "blurry dialog" rendering bug reported on Samsung Galaxy S3-class hardware in Chrome and Opera, and a content-level bug in Puzzle 7 specifically, where the developer reports that no tile will connect to that level's four-way intersection piece.
Final verdict
Road Blocks earns its strong 2015 placement and its unusual decade-long maintenance tail with a clean, well-explained core idea and a sandbox mode that gives it staying power most jam games never get. What keeps this at a 7.0 rather than higher is squarely the mobile input picture: this review's own testing couldn't cleanly confirm the drag mechanic either way, and the developer's own admitted, still-open issues around tap-to-select and mobile menu scrolling are reason enough to expect some friction on a touchscreen rather than promise a flawless experience.
Pros and cons
Pros
- The core loop is simple to explain and genuinely satisfying to execute — connect a grid edge to edge using a limited queue of tiles, with a helipad piece to reverse tile order and a bulldozer to remove mistakes, confirmed directly by playing through the "Roads 101" tutorial
- A real, unusual longevity story for a 13-kilobyte jam entry: js13kgames.com's own archived 2015 results rank it 2nd out of 60 that year, and the developer's GitHub repository shows commits as recently as this year, a decade of returning to the same small game
- All menu and level-select navigation — tapping into Puzzle mode, selecting a level, dismissing tutorial dialogs — was tested directly with real touch taps and real mouse clicks on both device profiles and worked cleanly and identically every time
- A free-build sandbox mode exists alongside the numbered puzzle set (confirmed in the main menu), giving the game a second, constraint-free reason to keep playing after the puzzles run out
- The developer maintains a public, actively-used issue tracker for a decade-old jam game, which is itself a genuinely useful transparency signal for a reviewer trying to separate real bugs from testing artifacts
Cons
- The developer's own currently-open GitHub issues describe real, unresolved touch problems in this exact build: a tap-to-select alternative mode "implemented... because lots of people (mostly on Chromebooks) have crappy touchpads and can't drag" that the developer says "still not great," with a specific known bug where tapping one tool then dragging from the queue doesn't register; a separate open issue reports touch events being cancelled mid-scroll on the mobile level-select menu
- This review's own testing could not complete a tile drag on either a touchscreen or a mouse profile — a picked-up tile was confirmed reacting to a real touch press, but no combination of drag or tap-to-place tested here successfully dropped it onto the grid, which this review treats as inconclusive given the developer's own admission that even they consider the alternate input mode unreliable
- A separate open issue reports that no tile will connect to the four-way intersection piece in Puzzle 7 specifically, a real content bug in one numbered level rather than the core system
- A "blurry dialog" rendering issue is separately reported by the developer on Samsung Galaxy S3-class hardware in Chrome and Opera, suggesting some real device-specific rendering inconsistency beyond input alone