Favorite Board Games I played in 2023 - Cartographers

Cartographers is another new game to me in 2023. The style of game is also relatively new to me. This year, I grew fascinated by games that are described as “roll & write.” Which is exactly what it sounds like. You roll some dice and you write things down. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people reading this have played the most famous roll & write game of all - Yahtzee. Or even Scattergories could be considered a roll & write because technically the round starts by rolling a die with a letter on it and then you write down words based on what you rolled. However, Yahtzee and Scattergories are a little more straightforward than what roll & writes have become, much like how other modern board games rarely use the roll & move style of Monopoly or Sorry, the mechanics and what you do with them have advanced greatly. Cartographers is often described as a “flip & write." Or to be more precise - “flip & draw.”

In Cartographers, players assume the role of a cartographer out exploring newly conquered lands for the queen. At the start of the round a card is flipped over, which shows what shape must be drawn on player mats and what kind of land feature they’ll be drawing. The player mat is laid out in a grid with various features printed on it. These features on the map have various obstacles or bonuses the player can interact with as the game goes on. Since your mat is a grid, most of the land features you’ll be drawing on your map are shown in shapes familiar to those who have played Tetris along with some other funk shapes made out of squares. Sometimes a card will have multiple choices for land features and shapes so players end up with very different maps by the end of the game.

Now, this would be a fun game as it is. There are many roll and writes where players are determining what to do on their player mats without much interaction from other players. Cartographers does something interesting though - mixed in the deck of villages, farms, and rivers, are monster camps. When a monster camp is revealed you pass your map to your neighbor and they draw on your map where the monster camp is. So your map might be coming along rather nicely and you’re teed up to score big points but your neighbor draws the kobold camp in just the right spot to break up your combo. It’s frustrating but you know what? You just did it to someone else too.

Another interesting feature of Cartographers is that it’s part of a larger universe of games. Thunderworks Games has released a number of games what they refer to as The World of Ulos, the fictional setting for a series of different games. The first of which is called Roll Player, which is a gamified version of character creation for a high fantasy adventure like Dungeons and Dragons. You go through the process of drafting dice to create your character stats like Strength, Dex, Constitution, etc and using cash earned throughout the game to purchase gear, spells, and other items to set yourself up for some high adventure. It’s a great game but, in my opinion, it’s a massive bummer to create these characters and do nothing with them. This is where the expansion Monsters and Minions solves this cruel tease by allowing you to use your character to fight… well… monsters and minions!

In my previous post I spoke about a number of rules games must adhere to to keep a place in my collection. Cartographers and Roll Player satisfy two of my major rules - they are both solo capable and they do not take forever to play. Naturally, they share a general theme. However, gameplay-wise, both are unique in my collection. In fact, I’m confident I can get both of these games in on a game night. I have an idea for a back-to-back series of these two games that develop an interesting narrative within their shared universe. Start with Roll Player where players compete to eliminate a terrible monster plaguing nearby lands. Once the monster is eliminated and the game ends record the scores. Then, switch over to Cartographers where players now map out the newly acquired regions for her majesty that were conquered in the previous game. Record the scores there and add it with Roll Player to crown the new champion of Ulos!

In the end, each player ends up with a unique custom character and a unique hand drawn map. Someone who won neither game could also potentially win the overall series. Two games were played that are easy to set up and break down. Each has their own completely separate mechanics that are easy to learn but difficult to master. Neither are overly competitive but they aren’t entirely solitaire either. With the shared universe, a natural narrative is formed and recounting the tales of adventure is sure to be a good time. As a bonus, you’ve now gamified your new character for D&D and if you’re a DM you even have a basic map as source material for your next campaign. I recommend either Cartographers or Roll Player but really… you should get both!

Favorite Board Games I Played in 2023 - Rallyman GT

Before I begin talking about Rallyman GT, I wanted to give a shout out to some honorable mentions for 2023.

First - Village: Big Box. I’m surprised I didn’t include Village on the list somewhere. I’ve been vocal for a long time about how much I love the original version and I’m an ardent defender of the new version’s updated artwork. The new version, dubbed Village: Big Box because it is indeed packed in a big box, comes with all previously released expansions plus a new expansion which brings in marriage and… a smuggler? I saw a comment asking why marriage and the smuggler were part of the same expansion. Obviously this person doesn’t have that scummy brother-in-law who knows where you can get something kinda illegal taken care of. It’s a great game, great art, and I love it very much.

Second - Cuba Libre. This one is mostly just getting a shout out so I look cool with a COIN series game on the list. But for real, what a crazy game. I’ve played it only a few times so maybe that’s why it didn’t make the list. It’s currently on the short list on my 2024 10x10 series (play 10 games 10 times each) so we’ll see how I feel about it at the end of next year.

Finally - Agricola. I played it only one time in 2023, at the time of this post, and when I played it it filled me with joy. Betrayal at House on the Hill was the game that made me say “holy crap, this is what board games can do now!?” But Agricola was the game that made me say “oh… this is what board games can do now.” Euros these days seem to be a little bit more forgiving but it felt good to go back to the starvation simulator that is Agricola. But in that one play I did really well, I’m curious to see how I do with more plays.

With that out of the way, on to the first entry on my list of Top Games I played in 2023 -  Rallyman GT. This one is a surprise entry even for me, and I’m the one making the list. It was bought on a whim mostly because I saw a BoardGameGeek user posting about it on the weekly “What Did You Play This Week” GeekList.  I kept thinking - if this person is playing it multiple times a week every week surely there’s something exciting about it. So when I saw it on sale for $20 I couldn’t resist.

There are other reasons why I decided it fit in my collection. Earlier in the year I had made a big purge of my board games. The idea was I’d pare the collection down to games and any new games had to adhere to some rules I’ve set for myself.

1. All games in the collection must have a solo component. I found that the best way to get more games to the table and more plays under my belt was to play them solo. For a long time in order to play board games I needed other people around. The problem is board games aren’t for everyone and I found myself leaning heavily on certain friends to come play board games. I grew concerned that they’d see me only as their board game friend and maybe I’d be looked over for other activities. I can’t be a one note guy so solo games fill the void when I’m giving my friends a break from my constant nagging to come play.

2. Themes must be varied. That is - If I have 3 games that occupy the “Space” theme I should reconsider getting another space game. For me, gameplay is arguably the more important aspect of a game but the theme is the first thing you see. More importantly, it’s the first thing my guests see. If I have too many games that are described as “well, you have a farm and you gotta feed your family” we’re probably not really going to be playing many games that day.

3. It can’t take too long to play. That means I had to say goodbye to Twilight Imperium during the great purge. I knoowwww… I know. It’s a tremendous game and I’ve enjoyed it every time I’ve played but if having people over to play is kinda rare I can’t expect them to spend 6-10 hours playing one game. Yeah, it’s epic. Yeah, everyone I’ve played it with has enjoyed it. But you know what? I played it three or four times and I think that’s enough for me. In that time I could play 3 to 5 different games and have a great day. So gameplay shouldn’t be more than 3 hours.

It’s rules number 1 and 3 that made me shift one of my favorite games during the big purge - Formula D. You can’t play solo and I think it’s a longer game than it needs to be. I did implement a house rule, which I typically frown upon, where once it’s your turn you have 30 seconds to pick your gear and 30 seconds to roll and move. It’s not a hard count of 30 seconds, nobody is running a timer or anything, but you should definitely feel pressured to make a decision. The whole point of the game is that we’re Formula 1 drivers racing to the finish line. Formula 1 is the fastest race in the world and analysis paralysis absolutely cripples Formula D. I’ve seen people go through every possibility of all available dice before finally deciding on one and rolling it. It totally takes people out of the game waiting for someone to make a decision and move. When you get up into the higher player counts the game drags tremendously. This is where Rallyman GT comes in. It is soloable, it fills in the racing game genre vacated by Formula D, and it’s not terribly long.

For the record, at the time of this writing, I’ve only played Rallyman solo, but it does exactly what I want it to and I expect it to be a hit once I play with friends. The way it works is like this - on your turn you collect dice that represent what gear your car is in and the cruise/brake dice. Starting with the space in front of your car, you lay out your dice in your desired path along the track in ascending or descending order. That is - if you’re just starting the race you’re stopped, so you place your 1st gear die, then your 2nd, then your 3rd, and so on. You cannot skip gears when you are ascending. This simulates shifting gears to speed up. Much like in real life, you don’t go faster if you go from 2nd to 4th gear. In fact, you’ll probably end up going slower down the track than someone who went 2nd to 3rd to 4th. However; you can skip a gear if you’re descending by using the brake dice. For each gear you skip you place a brake die with your chosen gear. So if you start your turn in 4th gear and you need to get to 2nd gear you’d place 1 brake die with your 2nd gear die to take the place of 3rd gear. Since you started in 4th gear and went to 2nd, you can then lay out dice in ascending order from 2nd to regain your speed. If you started in 3rd, shifted up to 4th, then braked down to 2nd, your options are limited. Since you started in 3rd you still have your 3rd gear dice available. But since you shifted up to 4th gear as your first move you don’t have the 4th gear die available anymore. This is where you can use the cruise dice, cruising allows you to maintain speed in a certain gear. Once you have all of your dice laid out, even if it’s just 1 die, you roll them and hope you don’t crash!

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here - the first thing you do before playing is you have to lay out your tiles and build your track. The booklet has tons of premade tracks and if you search online you can find recreations of famous tracks from around the world. There are also rules describing how to create your own custom tracks. This is an advantage over Formula D, which comes with only two tracks out of the box. One real-life F1 track and, on the reverse side, a fun “street racing” map that can be used with variant rules, which I played only one time because I almost always played Formula D with at least one new person so we always just did the F1 track.

Rallyman GT has very similar movement rules to Formula D as well but done in a friendlier, more fun way. In Formula D, each corner has a set number of times you need to end your turn within the corner zone. So if a corner requires you to end your turn one time within the zone, you must shift to a gear that will allow you to end within the corner zone otherwise you risk crashing. Rallyman GT does something similar but in a way that makes it feel like you’re going fast. Being forced to stop in a corner doesn’t feel fast to me. I’d argue that being forced to stop your turn in a corner feels the opposite of fast, it’s a hindrance. Instead, Rallyman GT tells you specific gear dice you need to place in order to take the corner without crashing. This means you could potentially pass through multiple corners on your turn, making you feel like you’re racing down the track hitting the perfect line. When you’re able to smoothly go from one corner to the next, you feel like a racing god. For this reason, I’ve played the same track multiple times trying to hit the perfect line through various corner slaloms and it feels fantastic.

The solo mode offers a challenge that’s different from the multiplayer in the form of a time trial. In the multiplayer your time to finish doesn’t matter, you just need to be first. The solo mode has a clever way to figure out your time around the track. After each turn you record which gear you ended your turn in. When you cross the finish line your time stops and you tally it up. For each turn where you ended in 6th gear you add 10 seconds to your time. Each turn you ended in 1st gear you add something like 45 seconds to your time. If you crash there’s a possibility you add 2 minutes to your overall time. Add it all up and your time trial is complete! I do wish the rules told you what should be considered a good time for each of their premade maps. The first time I completed a race I got almost 4 minutes and I had no idea if it was good or bad. A few tries later and I got under 2 minutes so I thought I’d check BoardGameGeek to see what times other people got. Apparently, what I thought was a fantastic time of 1:54 was actually garbage as many people had just barely over a minute. So I think from now on I’ll just record my times for my own enjoyment because these people might be savants or they’re cheating. It’s impossible to know for sure.

One thing I do miss from Formula D that Rallyman GT doesn’t have is that cool little gearbox. The gearbox was always a major selling point for Formula D. Anytime I showed it to friends it was always the gearbox that made their eyes light up. It was mandatory at my table to make race car noises every time you shift and I’m not sure if there’s an equivalent requirement that I can make for Rallyman GT. The other unfortunate thing with Rallyman GT is that the publisher went bankrupt earlier this year so many of the expansions are becoming hard to get. So if you want to race in Nürburgring you have to track down some now hard to find or very expensive expansions in second hand markets. Sooner or later it will be nearly impossible to find $20 copies of Rallyman GT and its sister game Rallyman DIRT. I’m very pleased I got it when I did and you should try to find a copy for yourself at your local game store.