After immensely enjoying my first foray into solo TTRPGs with Delve, I jumped into another map-making style game called Cartograph by Brandon Lee. The game had such great reviews, I purchased a physical copy at a pretty hefty price. The book itself is beautiful and well laid out. There are good explanations, easy to understand dice/card oracle tables, and even a sample walkthrough scenario to help explain things further. Unfortunately, my first playthrough wasn't exactly an enjoyable experience.
Cartograph is primarily a journaling game. You roll dice, draw points on a map where the dice land, decide where to go, draw poker cards that will tell you about your journey there and what you find when you arrive, then journal about the experience. I greatly enjoyed the concept and the journaling, and quickly developed a story for my cartographer -- why he was in these new lands, what he hoped to find, and the things he found along the way. The execution of the journey, however, proved cumbersome and not exactly a good time.
Each turn has three phases. At the start of your turn (phase one), you roll your dice. I had three biome dice (lakes, mountains, fields, etc) and one landmark dice (cities, towns, nothing, ?discovery). You are meant to roll these four dice onto a small portion of your blank page, then mark where they land and what you might find there based on the d6 # face up on the dice where it landed (example: biome dice rolling a two meant Mountain). You do this dice roll every round, which became an issue. You then pick one of the locations you marked and travel there, or any location marked in a previous round.
Phase two has two parts - the Journey and the Arrival. You draw a poker card for the journey to discover what may have happened while walking, and a second card to discover what awaits you at the location you chose. I either had some terrible luck in my card draws, or this game is a bit more brutal than expected. I kept getting wounded, or robbed, on the journey, and the locations never had much in the way of help or cool 'oooh!' moments. I quickly had zero coins, zero trade goods, two wounds, but a good amount of food. One more wound and the game would be over.
Phase three is the rest period, where you have to do two things from a list depending on your location. I had no coins or wares (trade goods), so my time in the cities/encampments was dominated by seeking out healing and some sleep, only to get wounded again on my next journey. In biomes, I typically hunted and slept (because the other option required coin or wares), so I always had an overabundance of food. By day three, I was a limping pauper who will most likely die of a twisted ankle, but at least I won't starve.
With the three phases of the round over, you journal about all of it (which I did find fun, and a bit satirically cathartic due to my poor luck), then your cartographer gets up the next morning and repeats phases one through three ad infinitum. More wounds, no coins for them to steal, more hunting, nothing to barter with. My poor cartographer got stuck in Groundhog Day, while my map quickly filled with places I will probably never get to visit.
And that brings me to my first real issue. The dice rolling. Every. Single. Round. It's a lot of dice. A lot of places added to the map each round, most of them empty and repeated. And my 9x12 sheet of sketch paper quickly felt inadequate. You can travel to a distant location at the cost of one food. I think it should also cost one food to roll the dice, and that it should be a choice as the cartographer if you are going to do it that round or not. Same goes for the 'rest' options. You end up spending most of the journey in biomes, which only have three rest options, of which you do two, and it got very repetitive.
My second issue is with the tables. The tables are nice, but...lacking. For the journey card you draw, there is one table for the face value of the card (A - K), but not for the color or suit of the card. For the arrive/location, they are divided into Red cards and Black cards, then face value. So Red Lake, Red Town, or Black Forest, then the card value. This gives thirteen options for your journey, and twenty-six options for the location. This could have been doubled, easily, by also using card suits. There are also only nine locations (four biomes and five landmarks). By day nine, I thought I had ended up in Minnesota with all the lakes I kept rolling.
The oracle table options are also...basic. Get wounded. Lose a coin. Discover a ruin, get a ware/trade good. I kept getting wounds and losing coins I no longer had. A couple times, the oracle was more open ended and kind of neat, like "you encounter someone on your journey who slows you down, why?", and I used this to move the story of the journal forward quite enjoyably. But they are mostly single sentence descriptions.
At $40 USD, I guess I was expecting a bit more...depth? More detailed oracle tables? More locations? I'm not sure, honestly. Just, more. Why only four biomes? Why are landmarks only cities/towns/discoveries? Their could be so much more to a map. Many of the tables are also questionable as to their necessity and seemed to just take up pages in the book. There are tables for naming your character, choosing their disposition (which has no actual bearing at all on any of the outcomes unless you remember to make it that way in your journal), naming places, etc. But the actual meat of the game (the oracles for the locations and what happens, and the items, discoveries and wares) felt lacking and repetitive.
I'm being a bit harsh, I know, but I am disappointed. I think Cartograph has a good set of bones, and with some tweaking and maybe more tables, I can turn this into something I will greatly enjoy playing.
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