Map Masters
- Board's Eye View
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Map Masters is a fantasy-themed dungeon crawler map-building game for 1-5 players. Designed by Ian Sebastien Bach and Cédrick Caumont, it's published by Captain Games and the reversible box lid illustrates the fact that it can be played either as a competitive or cooperative game.
All the cards in the game are in glossy finish so they can be marked and wiped clean, which players will be doing over the course of play. You're adventuring in a dungeon, so you'll be trying to collect treasures but you'll specifically need gold because you can spend that each round to buy more map cards to extend your exploration tableau and/or to buy spell cards to give you an effect that you can use each round.
Players all draw cards each round so that, with any map cards they've bought, they each have a hand of five cards, and they simultaneously lay these out so that they can draw a continuous path that optimises the treasures they can collect by passing through those icons. For each round there will be specific items that will be particularly valuable and score you extra points, but players only know one of them before they assemble their cards and draw their path. You'll need to pick up particular items to deal with negative elements that you trace your path through. For example, you'll need to have a sword to tackle a monster, a key to get past a lock or a rope to get across a pit. If you reach any portal icons and have the appropriate spell card, you can transport to another portal and continue your run from there, and indeed you may find there are cards with valuable treasures on them that can only be accessed through the use of portals.
Map Masters then is a puzzle optimisation game. Tho it's very different from After Us (Catch Up Games), there are obvious similarities in the path optimisation gameplay and in the deck-building aspect. For some rounds there will be a bonus for being the first player to complete their dungeon run but this isn't, in the main, a speed game. The rules suggest you allow 5 minutes for players to organise their five dungeon cards and trace their path, and we've found in our plays at Board's Eye View that that should suffice. The game is very accessible; Adrien Journel's artwork is appealing and the iconography is crystal clear so that from the outset it's pretty obvious what you need to pass the various hazards; this is one game where new and even quite young players will be able to manage without having to refer to the rulebook to decode any of the symbols.
We've particularly enjoyed Map Masters as a light competitive game that usually runs to around 40 minutes but if you want to play it solitaire or as a cooperative game then there is a booklet of missions with specific objectives for players to collectively achieve. For these games you layout cards in a grid that forms a shared tableau with alternating gaps that players fill using their hands of cards. Like the competitive mode, the cooperative game is more challenging than you expect it to be...
