All hail Queen Gimnax! Can you believe it? Your Royal Highness has deemed you fit to map the lands of the kingdom of Nalos. Grab your best feather pen and your travel ink bottle and go out there and explore! Just beware of nasty baddies – the roads aren’t safe anymore. Which is probably why your services are needed in the first place. Ah well, don’t worry about that now – if you come back in one piece, Queen Gimnax might just bestow her eternal gratitude upon you!
Name: Cartographers: A Roll Player’s Tale (2019)
Designer: Jordy Adan
Publisher: Thunderworks Games
Play type: roll-and-write, flip-and-draw, mapmaking
What the game is about
In this game you are trying to draw a map over the span of four seasons, each season keeping an eye out for two of four victory point cards.
Cartographers is a flip-and-draw game, which is a variant of the immensely popular roll-and-write genre – instead of rolling dice and writing down the result, you flip over a card and draw it on your map. Before the game starts, choose if you want to play with the basic map, or the more advanced map with a chasm in the middle.
How the game works
You are a mapmaker – each turn you flip an explore card and draw the depicted polyomino-shape on your map. At the start of the game, you draw four random scoring conditions and place them beneath cards A through D. The game is played over four seasons; each season looks at two different scoring cards that give you points at the end of the season. Each scoring card is only used twice. The season continues until the value of the revealed cards equals or exceeds the number on the season card.
You can pretty much draw wherever you want, barring two exceptions – whenever a Ruins card is revealed, the next card you draw must be drawn over a Ruins space; and whenever you draw an ambush card, you need to draw this according to the placement symbol in its top right corner. Every empty space that’s next to a monster space is -1 point each round.
After each season there’s a scoring round: you score for the two active scoring cards, gold coins acquired, and score negative points for empty spaces next to monsters.
After four seasons you tally up your total score, which is the total amount of points scored minus the four numbers on your scoring cards (their difficulty level, basically). You can check your score in the manual to see the title Queen Gimnax bestows upon you!
Theme, art & flavor
Like with most roll-and-write games, the theme is nothing more than a shell for the game mechanisms. There is no logical correlation between your actions and the setting of the game, but that’s perfectly fine by me. Small filler games don’t need a lot of theme to blow me away.
I’m content with flipping cards and drawing shapes on my map. I don’t need to be a cartographer to feel like one. The flavor is pretty cool and not something I see a lot in games – drawing maps.
Sure, a real mapmaker doesn’t get to place environmental objects however they like; but a) I’m playing a game and b) I’m a fantasy world mapmaker! If there’s goblins and kobolds, who says the world doesn’t magically crystallize the way I draw it?
How does it play?
As someone who likes to play Clever and Welcome To with his girlfriend, you might find it surprising to hear this is actually the first game in this genre that I have played solo – but gosh darn it do I like it!
Why haven’t I played other roll-and-writes solo, you ask? It’ partly because I don’t want to ‘solve’ those games (looking at you, Clever) and unbalance the games I play with the missus; partly it’s because I like a tad more ‘game’ for my solo experiences. (Caveat: I do need to try out the Alexis solo mode from Welcome To.)
Cartographers strikes the perfect balance between relaxing and challenging. You’re not just drawing crosses or writing down numbers, you actually have to draw shapes and fill up the squares according to the land type you’re drawing. Which means you spend more time drawing than in similar games. I used to draw a lot when I was younger; this game takes me back to that relaxing vibe. I love it!
Every card flip is tense – will I get just the right card, or is another enemy gonna come out and kick me in the hiney? You’re also constantly on the lookout for maximizing your scoring cards. Each round only looks at two of the four, sure; but you can try to setup big payoffs for future turns. Every decision is impactful while never bogging down the speed of play.
What I like
- relaxing yet challenging – a perfect balance for my needs
- drawing shapes is fun, and something else than just ticking off boxes or writing down numbers
- I love the setting, and how this game builds upon an established franchise without feeling like a forced thing or a cheap money grab
- with the way scoring cards are drawn and how explore cards and ambush cards come out, this game has plenty replayability
- Cartographers has a highly contagious case of the ‘one more game’ syndrome
- while I usually laminate my roll-and-write games, I appreciate the added pencils, which not all of these games have
- actually, Cartographers may be my favorite roll-and-write game not to use a laminated sheet with, since you get a beautiful personal map
What I didn’t like
- I had to get new thinner whiteboard markers just so I could play this game optimally on my own laminated sheets!
- yeah, I don’t have any serious negatives really…
Expansion
I preordered this game at Essen, ensuring a free copy of the Skills mini expansion. (I was glad I preordered it; when I got there on Friday morning they had already sold out!) This allows you to use earned coins to purchase one-time bonuses that the available skills provide – maybe you get to draw an additional 1*1 square, maybe you draw a 2*2 instead of the shape on the card, or maybe you get to draw the same shape twice.
I haven’t played this expansion yet and right now I don’t feel the need to. My game experience as-is is pretty much where I want it to be, and should it ever get stale, I have this expansion to fall back on.
Conclusion
This game is everything I want in a roll-and-write / flip-and-draw game. It’s quick to set up and quick to play while being engaging right from the start. You try to strategize your game plan up front based on the goal cards, but in the end you need to make tactical decisions based on what terrain cards come out. It’s an engaging experience throughout, one I can recommend to every solo gamer who just wants a small and light game to play for when their partner is watching something kinda interesting on Netflix and you want to sit besides them instead of in your gaming mancave. You might just catch their interest and end up playing Cartographers together!
Rating: ★★★★★
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Stidjen Plays Solo 