Each player is given a sheet of paper with a large grid on which to map their fantasy countryside. In each round, two cards are flipped face up, presenting two different options everyone can add to their map. Each option shows one or two terrain types (from a handful of possibilities) and one or two terrain shapes (think Tetris piece). Everyone draws their choice, then play advances to a new pair of cards.
After a few rounds, the game pauses for scoring; this happens four times for the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter. In each season, points are awarded for two different game conditions that are randomly determined at the start of each game. Each condition counts in two different seasons, making you care about particular terrain types for a time before moving on to other considerations.
Periodically, a card flips up that requires each terrain a player draws be put in one a few specific locations on their grid. At other times, an "attack" requires you to pass your map to an adjacent player, who then draws bad terrain on your map in the most meddlesome way they can contrive. These two elements throw wrenches into your carefully laid plans and force you to adapt on the fly.
It's a fairly easy game to explain and understand, with the most complicated element really just being the particular scoring conditions in any given game. (Some of them are considerably more complicated than others, and don't necessarily sink in at first glance.) The rules simplicity, plus the fact that (like so many "roll and write" games) it can expand so easily to any number of players, makes Cartographers a great "large group" game. We've played with as many as seven before, and the only theoretical upper limit is the number of game sheets you have to pass around.
Although the gameplay was quite different, Cartographers nevertheless reminded me a fair bit of another game I've played, Welcome To.... Both are spatial-minded games where players act simultaneously. The particulars are quite different, though -- and I find myself preferring Cartographers. The scoring system makes a huge difference; where Welcome To... just sort of presents all scoring options at all times and leaves it to you to figure out where to go, Cartographers cleverly funnels you to different goals at different times. That may sound like it's less strategically engaging, but the helping hand is actually quite nice. And you still have plenty of agency -- you could, for instance, give up what scores well for spring in order to score extra big for what's coming in fall.
That said, there is one element shared between Welcome To... and Cartographers that I'm much more skeptical of: it's another game where every player is presented the exact same choices at every stage of play. What you choose doesn't affect any other player. That means that in the end, you can't help but compare yourself directly to the winning player. If only you'd made exactly the choices they made throughout the game, you would have shared the win too.
Cartographers has at least a little bit of mitigation in this that Welcome To... does not have. There's that attack mechanism, where you must pass your map to another player to sabotage -- you have no say in what happens to it then. Also, the map's large grid offers far more possibilities about where you draw your terrain than the streets of Welcome To.... The choice matrix is much larger, making it harder to believe you really could have done exactly as the leader did.
In a competition between the two games, Cartographers comes out ahead for me. Still, I remain a little leery of the somewhat "tandem solitaire" nature of the "roll and write" games I've seen so far. I give Cartographers a B.
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