Designed by: Jordy Adan
Loosely affiliated with Roll Player, Cartographers is actually a stand-alone game that’s very different from its older sibling.
In Cartographers, the players are drawing their own maps, which will score in four different ways over the course of the games four rounds, which are comprised of the seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter. During each season landscape cards will be flipped allowing you to add a particular type of landscape to your map – forests, lakes, villages and so on. The catch is that each imaginary world is rigidly geometric: what’s drawn onto your map are tetronimoes (tetris-like) shapes, as dictated by the card, so the challenge is A. about fitting the shapes in at all and B. fitting them so they score plenty of points at the end of the season.
After a not-entirely predictable amount of landscape cards have been flipped and drawn, the season ends and everyone scores two sets of criteria (A and B). During summer B&C will be scored, in fall C&D and finally in winter D along with A again. The scoring criteria vary from game to game, but they might be a point for each square in your second-largest village, or 3points for every lake that isn’t next to a desert and so on.
Landscape cards are shuffled together again and new round begins. Outside of one or two scoring wrinkles and drawing parameters, that is pretty much the game… except! There are mountains on your map that cannot be drawn on, but gift you coins (effectively points) when surrounded. There are Monster cards that hit you with minus points and cards that allow your opponent to fill in spaces for you (choosing the most unhelpful position they can, of course) whilst you inflict the same fate on them.
At the end of Winter the points for every season are added together, and the most cartographically shrewd map-maker is the winner.
I've played this once and it didn't leave much of an impression, I'm afraid - like Sam I feel the investment can easily outweigh the reward once these sorts of games start to get more complicated.
Very little, outside of those few interactive cards. But when they hit they can do some damage.
Very low. Everyone is playing every round, so as long as people play at a reasonably similar rate...
There's an agonising here about what spaces you leave yourself, but the rules are very light.
The criteria for scoring differs from game to game, and you can't predict what cards will come out or when the season will end, so it's certainly not a game where familiarity makes one jaded.
1-8
Players
8+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
It's a roll-and-write game, where players share the same results (albeit in Cartographers the randomness comes from a card flip rather than dice rolling) and part of the fun is seeing how different patterns and strategies emerge from the same base material. I tend to like these games but what I've loved in the past their simplicity - the agony of options running out has a kind of deliciousness to it when the game lasts 15 minutes. When the playtime goes up I feel roll and writes start to become a little stodgy - although it gets a huge amount of love I found 2018's Welcome To... just a little too protracted to feel like fun. With Cartographers I have the same caveat - I still feel that roll-and-writes function best as short games and this can last a while, particularly with lots of players (the box boasts it plays 100 players, although you'd need to buy multiple copies if you're really attempting those kinds of numbers). But... but despite that I have very much enjoyed Cartographers when played with 2 or 3. It doesn't take much to learn and there is something about the pattern-forming that always scratches an itch.