THREE GREAT SOLO GAMES WITH MAPPING

EX NOVO

Ex Novo by Martin Nerurkar and Konstantinos Dimopoulos puts you in control of a village, town, or metropolis from the moment of its founding. You decide how old and large your city will become. During the founding phase, randomly-generated prompts will help you create a map and give you background on why people settled here. In the development phase, your settlement expands and shrinks; factions rise and fall, populations migrate, old neighbourhoods decline and mighty edifices rise and crumble. Over 200 event prompts help you bring to life the districts, residents, histories, political struggles, and design of whatever type of city you can imagine. Available on itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

DELVE

In DELVE by Anna Blackwell, you create an underground dwarven hold, discovering riches and uncovering horrors as you dig deeper. The 44-page rulebook has everything you need to generate natural formations, forgotten ruins, horrible enemies, legendary items and ancient magic. It has rules for constructing a variety of rooms, building defences and recruiting dwarves. Inspired by god games Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper, DELVE captures the feeling of building and protecting a fortress in an unforgiving subterranean world. All you need to play is a pencil and paper to draw the underground complex, and a deck of playing cards to generate events. The game has a few expansions and two separate versions: RISE – a variant about running a monstrous dungeon, and UMBRA – a variant about colonising strange alien planets. Available from blackwellwriter.com.

THE ROYAL CARTOGRAPHER

In this world-building game created by Albi, you develop two different communities that inhabit a distant corner of a vast kingdom. You define the groups, giving them names and assigning them cultural traits such as agricultural, martial or religious. In the first session, you place landmarks on a provided map that are important to the communities. Themes and events, randomly selected with a deck of playing cards, guide you to develop the story and significance of each location. In the second session, you play the role of a cartographer mapping the area for the regent who has opinions on what should be included on the royal map. Which landmarks will be forgotten to time? It’s a thoughtprovoking exploration of the power of maps. The Royal Cartographer includes rules for both solo and group play. Available from itch.io.