Cartographers - Solo Review

With a small footprint and barely any rules, Cartographers is perfect for small breaks or as a warm-up game.

Overview

The small box comes with a deck of colorful cards, a mini-expansion, a thick double-sided block of play sheets, and a small rules booklet. Games where you write on components inherently come with a limited lifespan, but there is way more here than you'd realistically ever play.

The production is well done, but I'd still recommend that you sleeve the exploration cards, as you're going to be shuffling them quite a lot.

Setup from one of my games (German version)

Gameplay

Like pretty much every roll/flip & write game, Cartographers follows a very simple gameplay loop.

At the start of the game, you randomly determine scoring conditions and lay them out as seen in the image above (under A,B,C,D). Each season, two of them will count toward your total score.

During the main part of the game, you 'discover' the world by flipping the top card of the exploration deck and drawing one of the shown landscapes into your map. This continues until a certain number of cards (determined by the season) have been drawn, at which point you score the current goals, reshuffle the exploration deck, and continue with the next season.

Additional complications come in the form of monster attacks that are shuffled into the exploration deck each season. It's possible to have no attacks or, if you're unlucky, several attacks during a single season. They mostly serve as a disruption to your layout and incur negative points if you don't deal with them (by surrounding them on the map).

The mini-expansion

The three one-use skills (also randomly determined) per game add a bit of additional decision-making, but they do not mesh well with the theme, in my opinion. They feel more like meta currency or jokers than coherent parts of the core game.

That being said, I've played around 15 games so far, and I like to include them for additional variety.

At the end of the game

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I quite like Cartographers. It's cheap, easy to store, quick to set up and tear down, and has barely any rules that you need to remember.

Playing the game is very relaxing, and I usually do it while watching or listening to something in the background. It's a neat little tile placement puzzle, and 'winning' really doesn't matter.

Fair warning, though, it is very random with its scoring. The nature of randomized scoring conditions combined with random card draw leads to wildly different scores across games. I've had games that were vastly above the maximum scoring condition, and others where it felt impossible to get anything but a negative score.

My other criticism concerns the theme. I love cartography and pretty much bought the games based on that simple fact alone. However, the novelty of drawing different squares of land quickly loses its appeal if you constantly draw the same shapes and arrange them on some arbitrary restrictions. By my fifth game, I barely saw the play sheet as a map and rather looked at it like an abstract puzzle.

Nonetheless, I can see myself playing this game for a long time, so I've already bought two of the alternative play mat mini-expansions.

 

Always check out several different reviews, so you can make an informed purchasing decision.