It Slices! It Dices!

The Map Game

We play a lot of Dots and Boxes. (Oh no! There's places you can play ONLINE... I'm doomed!) Well, not as much as we used to, because we don't have money to eat out anymore, but it used to fill up a lot of the time between ordering and receiving our meals. That time some folks use to do silly things, like catch up on all the daily events each have instigated, we use to trash talk and intimidate our opponents. Well, actually, the last few games I've played have been tutorials, but you have to build 'em up to knock 'em down, right?

So, we've gotten kind of tired of lines and boxes. We've got a new game, we call, "The Map Game."

The Map Game is what we do to roleplay when we can't actually roleplay at the table without being considered rude. It's great for kids about six years old and up. You need a pen (or pencil) and, well, a napkin or a placemat or a disposable menu you can draw on, although blank paper works a little better.

And then? You take turns drawing a map.

I usually start with a city or an evocative landscape feature. Optional rules include (but are not limited to):

• All items on the map have to start with the same letter.
  
• All items within a certain radius (usually a very loose "inch" measurement) have to have a similar element in their making. (If I make "the caverns of obsidian smoke," the next person working in that area has to play on one of those elements, either the obsidian or the smoke.)
  
• All cities have to have roads connecting them.
  
• Geographical features cannot be repeated.
  

We've not come up with any "winning" requirements (which is good and bad. Good because I can tell all the kids that they win, bad because we don't always know who wins when the food arrives.) I save the map to play a freeform AD&D game in afterwards when we've gotten home. (Usually we only get a few geographical features explored, but we get the possibilities...)