Hi folks!

I'm an artist, game designer, and amateur fantasy cartographer from Castlemaine, Australia.

I have a particular interest in designing print-and-play games with an emphasis on player expression. Given the nature of this community, I would like to briefly introduce my game, Fantasy Map Maker and talk a little bit about its development.

Fantasy Map Maker is a game for any number of players, but probably is ideal for solo players. In the game, you roll dice and score points based on 5 quests, leading ultimately to the creation of your own regional scale fantasy map. Here is a brief overview of the game: https://youtu.be/XrUNrWl6TBc?si=UWT8X1J7sL1H6-LK
And here is an image of a finished game sheet:
Click image for larger version.  Name: BBD4416A-1489-42EA-A181-0A56AD348835.JPG  Views: 6  Size: 2.13 MB  ID: 137415

The idea originally came from playing the flip-and-write game, Cartographers, and seeing the potential for a game that let you create a beautiful map. From there, I tried a few different options for how the features of the map could be drawn on the map, and what those features would even be. I researched different map-drawing tips from some popular content creators such as Josh Stolarz at Map Effects, and YouTubers MapCrow and WASD20 in order to help inform the rules of the game naturally lead to more plausible maps regardless of the player's experience in drawing maps. I was also fortunate enough to receive some fantastic feedback from BoardGameGeek community, who helped improve the game by suggesting things such as adding more "fantasy" features, streamlining the rules, and shortening the game time (at one point a single game took about 2 hours+ to play (!), but now sits between 30-60 mins).

After a year of development, the game has now been released, and I am happy to say it has received positive feedback from the community. That said, I want to continue developing the game. So, if the idea of a gamified map-making experience sounds interesting to you, then please consider giving the game a go yourself! There are still some free review copies available here: https://harry-metcalf.itch.io/fantasy-map-maker

Anyways, looking forward to being part of this community and learning more about cartography!

Cheers,
Harry