Cross Tips: Reading Traffic Lanes and Surviving the Speed-Up

Updated October 2026

Cross is a small board with a simple goal: walk from the green strip at the bottom to the green strip at the top through five lanes of traffic, then do it again while everything moves faster. There is no clock, no lives and no partial credit, so the whole game comes down to one question asked over and over: is the next cell going to be empty for as long as I need to stand in it? This guide explains how the lanes are built, how the collision check works, how quickly the traffic speeds up, and a crossing routine that holds up when the cars get fast.

The board and the only two safe rows

The playing field is five columns wide and seven rows tall. The bottom row, where you start in the middle column, and the top row, where you score, are grass. Every row in between is road. That detail matters more than it sounds: once you leave the bottom strip there is no halfway refuge. Each of the five lanes can be hit by a car, so every step forward commits you to a road cell until your next step.

Each swipe moves you exactly one cell up, down, left or right, and the arrow keys do the same on a keyboard. On a touchscreen the move happens when your finger lifts, and the swipe has to travel at least 18 pixels to count, so a lazy flick may simply not register. Stepping down is allowed, which makes retreat a real option rather than a last resort.

Because nothing pushes you forward, waiting on the bottom grass is completely free. You can watch the road for as long as you like before your first step, and the run only ends when a car touches you.

How each lane is built

The five road lanes are not identical. The two outer lanes, the one just above your start and the one just below the goal, carry a single car each. The three middle lanes carry two. Every vehicle is between 1.3 and 1.7 cells long, and on most screens anything 1.55 cells or longer is drawn as a truck, so a truck is a direct visual signal that this particular vehicle blocks a cell for longer.

Speed depends on the row, not on luck. At the start of a run the lane nearest your starting strip is the fastest at 2.4 cells per second, and each lane above it is a quarter of a cell per second slower, down to 1.4 cells per second for the lane next to the goal. So the first step is into the quickest traffic and the last step is into the slowest.

Direction is random for each lane, and it is rolled again together with every car position each time you score. You never get the same road twice in a row, so there is nothing to memorise between crossings; every crossing starts with a fresh read from the bottom strip.

A car that leaves one side does not reappear instantly. It travels half a cell past the edge, then re-enters from half a cell beyond the opposite edge, so a single car covers six cells plus its own length per loop. At starting speed that is roughly a three-second cycle in the bottom road lane and over five seconds in the top one.

What actually counts as a hit

The game treats you as a box covering the middle 80 percent of your cell, and trims a twentieth of a cell off each end of every vehicle. You are hit whenever those two boxes overlap. The check runs the instant you arrive in a new cell and again on every frame while you stand there, so stepping into the back half of a car that is already passing counts as a collision just as surely as being run over.

Adding those margins together, a single vehicle makes a given cell unsafe while it travels about 2.0 to 2.4 cells, depending on its length. At the starting speed of the bottom lane that is close to a full second of danger per pass. The trims are small, so do not count on squeezing past a bumper; treat the sprite as the danger zone.

Gaps: the long ones and the traps

In our simulation of the starting lanes, a given cell in one of the single-car lanes was clear about two thirds of the time, with one long opening per loop: around 2.2 seconds in the bottom lane and 3.8 seconds near the goal. The two-car lanes were clear only about 40 percent of the time, and their openings came in two very different sizes. Roughly half were long, typically 1.3 to 1.7 seconds, and the rest were short slivers under 0.4 seconds between the two cars of a pair.

Those slivers are the most common way to lose a run in the middle of the road. They look like an opening because there is visible asphalt between the cars, but there is barely time for one swipe, and none for a second. The habit to build is simple: in a two-car lane, wait for the stretch after the second car of a pair has passed, not the gap between them.

The two cars in a middle lane are also not locked together. Because each car loops over a distance that depends on its own length, the spacing between them shifts a little every time they wrap around. A pair that was tightly bunched a few seconds ago can open up, or the reverse, so re-read the lane each time you are about to enter it.

A crossing routine that scales

1. Read from the grass. Before your first step, look at the bottom road lane and the lane above it together. You want the fast bottom lane to clear just as the second lane is about to open too.
2. Pick your column. You can shift sideways on the safe strip at no cost. Choose the column where the upcoming openings line up best, rather than walking straight up from the middle by habit.
3. Step in behind, not in front. Enter a lane right after a vehicle's rear end has passed your column. The whole loop then has to come around before that lane threatens you again.
4. Keep the next move ready. While you stand in a lane, look one row up. If the next lane will not open before your current one closes, step back down instead of forward.
5. Use sideways moves sparingly. A sideways step can dodge into the open part of the same lane, but it also puts you in the path of whatever is coming from that side. It is a rescue move, not a plan.

After you reach the top row the game holds you there for a quarter of a second, ignores input, then puts you back in the middle of the bottom strip with a newly rolled road. Use that pause to look at the new traffic before your thumb moves.

How fast it gets

Every successful crossing multiplies all traffic speeds by 1.08, and that multiplier keeps compounding with no ceiling. After 5 crossings cars are about 1.47 times their opening speed, after 10 about 2.16 times, and after 20 about 4.66 times. At that point the fastest lane moves more than 11 cells per second, the openings that were two seconds long last well under half a second, and the time you can stand in any lane shrinks with them.

Because the openings shrink in the same proportion as speed rises, the shape of the problem stays the same while the time to act gets shorter. That is why the routine above is worth practising slowly. Choosing the right gap is a reading skill you can learn at low speed; executing it quickly is what later crossings test.

Common mistakes

• Treating a middle lane as a rest stop. Every road row can be hit. If you need time to think, step back to the grass.
• Taking the sliver. The short space between two cars of a pair is usually too short to use.
• Forgetting the speed bump. The road you just crossed was 8 percent slower than the one in front of you now. Wait a moment for your sense of timing to adjust.
• Weak swipes. A swipe under 18 pixels does nothing, which feels like freezing in front of a car. Make each swipe short but deliberate.

Your best number of crossings is saved on your device, and you can submit a finished run to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.