It’s not easy to get a handle on Maps of Misterra’s gameplay. It somehow all seems to just be slightly off-center. On the one hand, its combination of shared and individual board reminds me of one of my favourites: “Remember our Trip”. On the other, the interplay between the boards and their players is clearly different. It’s difficult to find a mental framework for the whole game, which occasionally invites criticism of Maps of Misterra as being unthematic. Which isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s not quite right, either.

Maps of Misterra is, in the widest and closest sense, a tile-laying game. Each round you take a rectangular card, split in half like a domino, and place it on your player board. You then mirror that card on the shared board. If your card had a forest symbol and a mountain symbol, you place a forest tile and a mountain tile on the respective spaces on the shared board. This is reasonably straight-forward. The first hurdle turns out to be, that you may only place a card adjacent to the space on your board that matches the space on the shared board, which your player token is on. This invisible thread that ties the shared board to your personal board, can be quite confusing during the first few turns. You may end up placing a card on the shared board, even though size and illustrations do not match. Or you end up placing a card on your board in a spot that your player token can’t actually reach on the shared board. This mental back and forth can be somewhat minimized by referring to the shared board as the “island” and your own board as the “map”. The rulebook speaks of the island board and the parchment board respectively. Somewhat clunky terms for regular use at the table. They arguably make understanding the game and its flow a little more difficult. More importantly, they make the thematic scaffolding feel awkward.

Build on top of this core interaction, there are also rules that govern moving your player token across the “island”, as well as rules handling differences between the “island” and your “map”. Some tiles on the “island” end up changing multiple times throughout the game. This ends up blocking or expanding the movement options of your player token. Other tiles are quickly set and don’t change their landscape type for the rest of the game. This back and forth often draws the group’s attention. A repeatedly changing landscape tile quickly provokes player commentary:
“I regret to inform you, that this lake was in fact merely a pond on a mountain.”
“My esteemed colleague, you are mistaken. This mountain is merely a hill in a forest.”
“I have to correct you both, as this forest was merely a collection of bushes in the plains.” (etc. ad nauseum).
While this does create some mild entertainment at the table, it rarely manages to merge with the game’s theme and by extension its goal.

That goal, if you were to deduce it from which achievements will garner you victory points at the end of the game, aims for a balancing act. One which is mostly responsible for why Maps of Misterra’s gameplay is so hard to grasp at times. Because victory points are awarded on both the “island” and the “map”. Which means you can pursue the personal goals of your “map” or try to match your “map” to the landscape tiles of the “island”. On paper, this sounds like a classic designer’s move to create opposing scoring conditions for players to be caught in. The tension that arises is supposed to be both exciting and intriguing. In practice, a different kind of player dynamic emerges. Since the landscapes of the “island” are directly tied to the decisions players make about their personal “map” and that decisions depends on whether players choose to fulfil their personal victory conditions or would rather seek to match their “map” to the “island”, the actual distribution of victory points feels unpredictable and arbitrary. One half of your victory point sources are barely influenced by your own decisions, yet they are the ones that make the most sense thematically. Landscapes on your “map” that match landscapes on the “island” will score points. But the most interesting and engaging dynamic in the game, is how we can move our player token around the island in such a way that our “map” fulfils our personal victory point conditions.

This might leave you with the impression that Maps of Misterra has more rules than it needs to create a well-rounded experience. That the opaque mathematical connections between a decision and its point value, make it difficult to fully dive into the game’s core experience. But I would instead argue, that Maps of Misterra lacks the thematic scaffolding to focus player attention on what makes Maps of Misterra interesting and unique.

Thanks to the connection lottery that is social media, I ended up in a short conversation with one of the game’s co-designers. He pointed me towards a designer’s diary (which basically functioned like an audio commentary on a DVD/Bluray) in which he talked about the development history of the game. I found that post very interesting and quite enlightening. Because it managed to fill out the thematic blind spots of the game and by offering a look behind the scenes, it managed to recharge the game’s theme.

The unavoidable abstractions of cartography were spelled out, providing a different context for our decisions at the table. The explanation of our personal victory point conditions as the assumptions and wishes of our supposed financiers gave the game the necessary thematic framework to add weight to our decision-making. We could either commit to capture the truth about the “island”, or tell our financiers what they wanted to hear. Especially for players, who aren’t that invested in making optimized decisions from the first game on, these thematic guideposts are invaluable. By comparison the rulebook spares barely half a line to suggest that the victory points conditions may have a thematic dimension.

Maps of Misterra shows that a game’s thematic scaffolding isn’t just a question of visual aesthetics, but also a tool which guides decisions and thereby the game’s flow. It’s the important first few plays of a new game, which most benefit from this contextual knowledge. Without the co-designer’s design diary Maps of Misterra would have remained a much more superficial and inconsequential experience for me. But the more I’d learned about the thematic considerations and the reasons for certain design decisions, the more rounded and complete Maps of Misterra felt to play. Because a game’s theme isn’t simply contained within the contents of its box. It’s primarily created through the additional knowledge and the thematic interpretations the group is familiar with (or made familiar with before they play).

We construct our experience with a game from the thematic building blocks, that we’re given. To borrow an Alfred Korzybski-quote from the designer’s notes: “The map is not the territory” or when adapted to this situation: “The game is not the thematic experience”.

Maps of Misterra works better as a game, once you know its background. Because then the tension between the “real island” and the “incorrect map” that we create together, feels intended rather than a design oversight. Because then we have a reason for making a decision that doesn’t require a mathematical analysis of an often opaque and generally unpredictable points system. Without the necessary thematic focus, Maps of Misterra feels like a game without a clear goal or intended experience. That is regrettable, because the solution for this problem seems so simple. Maps of Misterra needs its designer’s commentary to fully shine.