Please Take The Third Exit on the Round-A-Bound: MAP MASTERS review

I was in seventh grade the first time that I held a blank piece of graph paper in my hand. We had just finished an introductory session of my first ever adventure playing Dungeons & Dragons, basic edition. My friend, Jon, was the dungeon master, and he made us experience that first game toute imagination. No miniatures, no maps, no charts, just a hand full of strange looking dice. Right from the start, the focus was on feeling the adventure in our mind’s eye.

But at the end, after we had spent the few copper coins we had collected on some mead and bread at the inn, the DM let us take a peek at the his toolkit, which included a pack of white paper with straight lines criss-crossing in military fashion. Seeing that blank slate for the first time was like waking up in a foreign city after traveling all night and looking out your hotel window at the wonders below.

The possibilities were almost endless — or at least that’s how it seemed to a thirteen year old with an active imagination. My plays of Map Masters, the new dungeon designin’, dungeon crawlin’ adventure from Captain Games peeled away years of dust and put me right back in that spot in Jon’s living room, but this time staring at five cards in my hand and seeing almost limitless possibilities.

Let’s get one thing out of the way, though. Map Masters is a timed board game, at least at the suggestion of the rulebook and designer, and that’s the only way we’ve played it. It’s designed by Ian Sebastian Bach, who also crafted Baseball Highlights: The Dice Game, and since he knows the game better than anybody (except maybe Cédrick Caumont who developed and published it), we took his advice to set a five minute timer for each round. I mention this because some people are afraid of timed games, shocked into mumbling by games like Escape: The Curse of the Temple or Galaxy Trucker.

If you are one of those gamers who dislike playing a game in competition to falling sands in an hourglass, I hear you. But before you run, let me tell you a little bit more about the game, and see if that entices you to try Map Masters.

Because fellow adventurer, you really should try it.

Map Masters is a competitive game (or a co-operative game, the box comes with rules and components for both ways of playing, and helpfully, the cover can be viewed in either orientation to project competitive or co-op) published by Captain Games that combines map making and map exploring. I affectionately call it “Five Card Dungeon Run” because that pithy little epithet tells you almost everything you need to know. Players start with a hand of five cards, from a deck of very basic dungeon map cards, and try to connect them in such a way that they can use an erasable pen to enter their “dungeon”, follow the map, collect a bunch of treasure and defeat a bunch of monsters, and exit scoring more points each round than the other players.

Since this is a modern board game, there is more to the mechanisms than just that description. There’s a little bit of engine building, because each round players will use the gold that they have collected to buy upgraded cards for their deck, or even buy spells that can be used each round to get past sticky wickets on the map. And there’s tension in every round, because players are given a goal at the start of the round, a marker that gives us bonus points for collecting certain items or completing tasks like interacting with stairways in the dungeon.

But at its heart, Map Masters is all about the experience of prepping and running the dungeon.

Five minutes. Five cards. One pen. Geaux!

I have played Map Masters over a half dozen times already, and so far, I’ve only “blue screened” once. SneauxBunny and I were fighting tooth and nail all game for the lead, and had reached the tenth and final round dead even. I readied my hand of dungeon cards, set the timer, and we began. I cannot explain why or how it happened. All I can tell you is that I stared and stared at the cards, rotating them, looking at my spell book and tokens, not committing to any orientation or pathway. My face looked like the proverbial dungeon crawler in the headlamp.

I finally splayed the cards as best as I could, connected the cards orthogonally in a haphazard manner, and started my run. I traced a long hallway down to a pit trap that would have exited me out of the dungeon too quickly. I turned over a fairy token that let me swing past the trap, and kept moving.

Seconds passed. At least in my mind, it was just a few seconds after I set the timer.

Right?

I glanced at my watch, double checked it, and then flatly announced “15 seconds left” to my wife, even as the realization that 15 seconds was not enough to finish out the other two or three cards and still score well on the goal that round. If I exited quickly, though, I would preserve my streak of always exiting at the end of each round (which gave me a small bonus). Caught between re-ordering the cards for the tenth time and just getting the bonus, I panicked and went left, bypassing a large room filled with monsters and treasures and items, oh my.

And then, I was out of the dungeon and the timer mercifully started buzzing.

Two points. As I recall, I scored only two points that round. Of course, SneauxBunny crafted the perfect dungeon run, and zoomed past me for the win. Defeated? Hardly. Because I received a boon that round.

For a split second, a memory popped up. A memory of that first “dungeon run” I experienced with Dungeon Master Jon, when my lowly little first level fighter bucked up to an equally tiny kobold for the first time, lost in a dungeon without a map and trying to fight my way out. I lost that fight, and as I recall, my party members saved me, dragging me out in the nick-of-time. But we had created a memory of that first adventure, because my friends and I always laughed about the time that the kobold knocked me out cold. Dungeon 1, BJ 0.

I realized something as the memory ended. I didn’t lose Map Masters to SneauxBunny. I earned another funny memory.

Dungeon 2, BJ 0.

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!

— BJ from Board Game Gumbo