by W. Eric Martin

At Gen Con 2025, I bypassed most of the new releases with an eye toward seeing what's coming at SPIEL Essen 25 or in 2026. To assist with that goal — and to self-servingly market their own release, of course — Cédrick and Gwen Caumont of Belgian publisher Captain Games were kind enough to arrange a preview of Map Masters, a 1-5 player game from Ian Sebastian Bach.

In fact, Map Masters is two games in one, with one being a competitive, solitaire-ish, deck-construction game and with the other, co-designed by Cédrick Caumont, being a co-operative game with multiple missions. Let's talk about the competitive game first as those elements are then re-mixed in the co-operative game.

To set up, each player receives money and an identical deck of map cards. At the start of each of the six rounds, you draw five cards from your deck, then reveal an objective card, such as sword or barrels or magic scrolls.

Each player simultaneously reveals their cards, then arranges them into a dungeon in whatever manner they want. They then trace a continuous path that starts at one of the card edges, that cannot cross itself, and that "interacts" with the dungeon in various ways until ideally you exit off the edge of a card. Here's one such image taken in terrible lighting:


Let's zoom onto the map itself:


You circle each item that you run across, then cross it out if you use it. In this round, I entered through the upper left, circled a barrel, then a scroll, then passed through a lock (thanks to the fairy key I had purchased at the start of the round), circled a sword, spent my scroll to pass through a magic portal, circled a barrel and coin, dropped through a pit, and continued until I exited.

The goal that round was to go through as many pits as possible, with a drop being free and an ascent costing you a rope. I had only one pit and hit that...so what was all of the other activity for?

Well, after everyone has finished their path, you reveal a second objective card, and since you don't know what that is at the start of the round, you are encouraged to hit as many icons as possible to maximize your potential score from that secondary objective. Clever idea!

In addition, you want to circle as many coins as possible because after revealing the objective at the start of a round, you can spend money to purchase new cards for your deck or one-shot fairy tokens (each showing one item such as a sword or scroll), with the tokens disappearing at round's end whether you use them or not. You already know what the objective is, so ideally you can grab cards that feature it, with the player who has the least money buying stuff first.

Purchased cards might also have helpful symbols such as scissors and recycling. If your path hits scissors, you can remove one of your dungeon cards from the game at round's end, something every deck-builder encourages so that you can ditch lame starting cards in favor of new purchases. If you hit recycling, you can keep one of your dungeon cards and use it again next round.

In addition to scoring for objectives, you receive bonus points if you exit the dungeon or are the first to finish in a round.

Okay, let's head into the co-operative game, with this being the set-up for the first mission:


To do this, you shuffle the starting decks together, then lay out a checkerboard grid, with the center tile showing our objective, which I've zoomed onto at right.

We must defeat the gnome Jean-Michel, and to do that we must move four adventurers to his location, with one adventurer having five swords, another five coins, another five scrolls, and the final one a single rope. Each adventurer must start on a different side of the grid in front of a particular entranceway...or in front of a blank space that we will fill in later.

To finish set up, we create a somewhat random deck using both starting cards and those that can be purchased, then deal that out among the players, with each of us having only a few in our hand at any one time. We also have a bit of money with which we can buy fairy items or special-action spellbooks.

To play, in turn each player places a card from their hand on an empty space, then draws a new card. You can talk in as much detail as you want, asking others whether they can play a card to connect two paths, for example, or add a sword to a path to defeat a monster further on. Once you have a complete path from an adventurer to Jean-Michel, you can draw it out to prove that they will have keys to open locks, scrolls to use portals, etc., along with whatever item(s) they need to help overcome Jean-Michel.

Here was our final board:


As in the competitive game, adventurers cannot cross paths, but they're not limited to a straight line. The adventurer on the right, for example, walked from bottom to top, picking up multiple swords along the way, then we used a spellbook to teleport them to the card in the upper left, after which they made their way to the center. The adventurer on the bottom hit only four scrolls on their path, but that's because we had used a coin to purchase a scroll fairy token before starting play.

If you succeed, you can calculate a score based on the mission guidelines, with empty spaces and leftover coins adding to your total in this case. (Cédrick says failing mission #1 is almost impossible, with the goal being for players to learn how to prepare for and navigate future missions.)

The two Map Masters experiences use similar components, but feel opposite, with the competitive game being a quiet, solitaire, puzzle-like challenge of maximizing your personal holdings and the co-operative game pulling everyone together to make plans, talk through problems, and give out celebratory high fives. In one or both experiences sound appealing, you can look for Map Masters in October, with the game debuting at SPIEL Essen 25.