Cartographers: A Roll Player Tale

Product Information

You might not be scored on all four Edicts at the end of each season but it is still wise to work towards all four Edicts – A to D – simultaneously, if you can. But it's also more free in that you can more easily segregate terrains from each other, which makes some of the other scoring cards boring. 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. Through official edicts, the queen announces which lands she prizes most, and you will increase your reputation by meeting her demands.

One word of warning, if one person is being nice to the person passing the map to them, it can certainly be a benefit to that person, especially if everyone else at the table is like me and finding that perfect spot to hit the player with as many negative points as possible, and also making it difficult to fill in those empty spaces around the monsters. I mentioned before that objective cards are the main thing that change the puzzle from game to game, and while there is a lot of variety in the base game, these expansion objectives keep the game nigh endlessly replayable. This is the pre-production version, so the art, rules and mechanics may be subject to change over the next couple of months. I find that the ways these scoring cards change the game bend my brain in a way similar to Dominion: each game requires a new, adjusted approach. Quite honestly, there’s not much more to say here because a lot of the thoughts on the solo mode have already been spoken of in the reviews of the multiplayer game.I’m a lousy artist and drawing something that would look recognizable in that small a space would take way too much time, so I try to get by with abbreviations for the different terrain types, which usually confuse my opponents and sometimes myself. What makes it so much fun is the deck effects which terrains are available each game, which scoring cards are used in each game, the interaction with the ambush cards each game, and just drawing tons of silly representations of the terrain on your map because if I am being honest, drawing is not my forte. It is quick to set up, very easy to grasp, scales nicely from 1 to many players and is both a relaxing experience and a delightful puzzle.

Similarly, is it better to draw a terrain that will score earlier (taking immediate points) or making certain that the card that hasn't scored yet will score well later--and twice?

If there is another season to be played the Explore cards are reshuffled, minus any revealed Ambush cards, and a new Ambush card is shuffled in.

Every player takes a pencil and a map and decides which side they want to play, ensuring all players are on the same map. I have one thing though, heroes don’t seem to count as a terrain type for some of the classic objectives. There is an ambush pack promo available for the game, and while I usually don't like promos, this is a perfect way to expand the types and shapes of monsters available for the game. If an Explore card is drawn, take note of the terrain type(s) shown, the shape(s) shown and whether a coin is shown – we’ll need this information for the Draw phase. This review is based on the retail version of the game provided to us by the designer and publisher.All of these decisions are good trade-offs, and there is rarely a "right" answer, at least when the game begins. You can almost envision the puff of breath that would accompany the little goblin’s speech as he points out a specific feature of the map laid out before him. 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.

When the game draws to a close at the end of four seasons, the person who has accumulated the highest score wins. The most important thing that Heroes adds to the game, in my estimation, is even more objective cards--four of each type. Whilst the monsters are classic fantasy opponents, like a dragon and a troll, the heroes are a little generic.

In the past yi couldnae move fir sumwan chattin aboot it, stickin it oan lists and Twitching all oer tha innernet. If you're like my friends they'll spend ages drawing faces and almost giving names to each of the characters. The overall scoring/ranking system seems to be messed up - scores aren't accurate (unless there is some other ranking system used, which is unclear) and dates and times of games played seems to be based off a single international date/time and not local to the phone. After each season, any empty space adjacent to a monster drawn on your map sheet is worth one negative point.