Cartographers Solo Flip-and-Write: I Was Fired After My First Play
My cartopher was attacked by gnolls who urinated on his lunch, but I still enjoyed this flip-and-write and intend to play it some more.
Cartographers Play Sheet: Rookie mapmaker Stafford Airbiscuit may not be a “culture fit” for this kingdom
As the backstory goes, the great Queen Gimcrack has just strong-armed a fat chunk of land from some other weakling, and it’s my job to help map it in the name of the Great Kingdom of Naloxone.
My name is Stafford Airbiscuit. I am a cartographer.
“Will the mission be dangerous?” I ask the queen.
“Probably,” she says. “Now get your little pencil out there and zone this thing.”
“How shall I zone it?”
“I don’t know yet,” she says, “it depends on where the mass graves are and how quick we can get residential developers on board. Keep an eye out for my edicts. And don’t put two artisanal burger places next to each other, it messes everything up, ‘kay?”
***
So it is my adventure with Cartographers begins — a game that continues to rate highly in the tabletop community among the past few year’s crop of move-and-write, flip-and-write, roll-and-write games…basically puzzles and engine builders where you attack a particular setting with paper and pencil trying to combo high scores based on where you mark things on your map or playsheet in response to the game’s challenges.
In Cartographers, the challenge is placing strips and chunks of polyomino-shaped terrain — villages, streams, forests, and farms — onto a newly acquired land. This land was won with the utmost probity and respect for international law.
The job description for my Cartographer, Stafford Airbiscuit, will be a lot like yours: You’ve got four seasons to do the job. During these seasons, changes in policy or the Queen’s blood pressure means the terrain patterns you’re trying to place will be rewarded in different ways depending on which exploration cards and scoring cards are out. Those cards also contain some curveballs, like finding Ruins that constrain your placement choices or pulling a monster raid from the deck, which crowds your map with unwanted symbols that drag down your score.
Hadrian’s Wall was my first experience with this school of design. I talked about that back in Episode 90. Hadrian’s Wall’s historical flavor, action variety and resource-heavy scheme kept it on my table for quite some time.
Cartographers is much simpler, which is the whole point; what I’m after here is something light and fizzy with a little pulp: Something refreshing in between learning sessions of Comancheria: The Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire, which is still hogging up my main table with its intricate procedures and massive scope.
So I sit down with a pencil and walk a few solo turns. Using the short and clear rulebook, the few solo turns quickly become my first game.
The turn framework is pretty simple and the conditional stuff is easy to get your head around: Set up a season, see which two scoring cards are in effect, then draw explore cards that show you what terrain types and shapes you have to work with.
***
I had an easy time with the mechanics, but not a particularly good game; Stafford Airbiscuit has to go back to the queen with a score of 37. Which translates into a job rating of -45 per the solo grading rules.
“So what were we doing out there, exactly,” she says, holding my map incredulously.
“Well, the goblins kept attacking and the gnolls stole my lunch and went to the restroom on my lunch…”
“And did they also force you to place these two farms in zones where we don’t even get tax credits? I specifically addressed this in Edict B. Did you get it?”
“It was in the same bag as my lunch. They didn’t even eat the lunch, that’s what was so hurtful and sick about the whole thing.”
“Listen,” she says, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, “we covered gnolls in the kickoff meeting. Do me a favor, draw a timeout space somewhere on this map and get your head together. We’re trying to map a kingdom here, this isn’t adult daycare.”
Looks like poor Stafford has a lot of improvements to make if he’s ever going to become a proper cartographer.
There are still 99 map sheets on the pad. That’s plenty of chances to get better at reading the shifting cards for opportunity and scanning the map for better placements — and figuring out how to draw a house better. I still can’t believe how bad my houses look when I fill in a village space. It’s really starting to bother me.
My game 2 playsheet: Better than my first game’s score, but I’m still fired