| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 1+ |
| ⏳ | Time: 30-60 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 10+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Dice rolling, drawing, map addition, solo |
Fantasy Map Maker from Doopy Games is part game, part creative endeavour, and unlike most other games, it’s also completely relaxing and meditative.
During the game, you will map out features such as mountains, coast, houses, and forest, as well as drawing in prominent landmarks that provide effects you can use. Five different types of quest cards (Geology, Landmarks, Nature, Towns, and Wheel) provide placement requirements for scoring, as well as the AI opponents’ scores for solo mode.
Each round, dice are rolled to determine which part of the feature wheel you will select your features from, and how big the feature must be (or, in the case of landmarks, where they will feature on your map).
Each feature has different rules – e.g., mountains must be drawn across the intersections of the grid lines, coastlines cross grid lines horizontally or vertically, and lakes cannot cross gridlines. All features must be drawn either partially or fully in a space that has been previously explored (mapped).
To spice up the game, you can use event cards. Some of the events you may come across include a meteor strike, monsters, and a volcano. Events trigger when doubles are rolled, and may cause you to lose points, depending on what features you place around them. When playing solo, triggered events also help reduce the scores of the 3 AI opponents.
Fantasy Map Maker also comes with an expansion called The Continent, where you draw 4 maps (north west, north east, south east, and south west) to create – you guessed it – a continent. Each map is its own mini game, using similar rules to the base game. Each map has its own objectives (and events, depending on how you wish to play) as well as 2 additional Main Quest continent objectives that apply to all maps.
All objectives when playing The Continent are scored at the end of the game, rather than after each map. This is due to the introduction of a new landmark – a port – which allows you to draw a feature onto an already completed map. To make the maps more cohesive, features that cross the green lines where each map joins the others bleed into the next map, but features cannot bleed into already completed maps. Features are also not allowed to cross the red lines around the outer edge of the map.
Once you become familiar with how each of the features and landmarks in Fantasy Map Maker must be placed, the game moves relatively quickly (depending on how long you take to draw your features). Thankfully, there is a handy reference page to guide your map-making, so there’s not too much downtime, even if you have to check. There is also little to no admin required each turn, so you can just focus on creating a map masterpiece.
I’ve mostly been playing Fantasy Map Maker solo, and though I’ve yet to score well enough beat any of the AI opponents, I’m still really enjoying the game (after all, don’t they say it’s the journey, not the destination that matters?). It has been such a lovely way to disconnect from technology. You absolutely don’t need to be an artist to play, but playing does help to foster your creativity.
Although not required by the game in any way, I find myself making up stories about this world that I’m creating. One of my favourite parts of map-making is when events are triggered; they really help build the lore for the world that I’m inventing. I also just really enjoy drawing little monsters and disasters on my map. I enjoy playing both the regular mode and The Continent expansion, but with The Continent expansion, I feel more like I’m crafting a whole world, rather than just exploring a small part of it. I can’t help but feel that the maps you make in Fantasy Map Maker would be a great starting point for RPG world-building or novel writing. It’s such a nice change to put my creativity to good use (rather than overthinking), and it’s a very relaxing way to spend the evening… and who knows, maybe one day I’ll get even more creative and write a novel based on the world I map with Fantasy Map Maker.
Fantasy Map Maker is on Kickstarter now and has reached its funding goal. The campaign will conclude on the 3rd of March 2026.
You can see this post on Instagram here. For further information about Fantasy Map Maker, check out the Kickstarter.
The prototype copy of Fantasy Map Maker used for this review was provided to Board All The Time by Doopy Games.
The Boardgame Detective 