Some dear friends introduced me to the Mapominoes series of games, which are, aptly named, effectively dominoes but with maps. There are several maps to choose from! We played Africa, Europe, and Asia & Australasia, and since those continents connect, they also have mechanics in place to play them all together. Some of the others, like the UK Counties and US States, probably don’t have the option to interconnect, but the gameplay is entertaining nonetheless.
The whole deck of countries (or states or counties) is split between the players, and each player will get a certain number of transit cards, as dictated by that variant’s rules. On their turns, players place one card, which must border every other card it touches. For instance, Switzerland can go next to Germany, but not Belgium, because Switzerland and Belgium don’t share a border in real life. Because each card only has four sides, and some countries have more or less than four neighbors, the map will very quickly devolve to looking nothing like the real deal.
Some cards share borders with a body of water, i.e. Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean, or France, which borders the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea. Some cards, like Madagascar, only share borders with a body of water. This is where transit cards come in. Transit is a bit like a wild card, able to act as any country or body of water. However, unlike wild cards in other games, the place the transit card is substituting must be declared as it’s played, and every card adjacent to it both then and after must share a border with the place it represents. As a result, you may wind up with multiple cards representing the same location at once – in the photo below, we functionally had two Tanzania cards. This only adds to the chaos of the map. This is also why different continents have players start with a different amount of transit cards – if you’re playing Asia & Australasia, you’re going to have a lot more island nations than if you’re playing Europe.
Transit cards or not, there comes a point when playing your cards is impossible. Perhaps the one open space next to South Africa is boxed in by other cards, and you can’t play Swaziland. Perhaps that space would be open, but you’ve reached the edge of the table, which by the rules of the game is “the edge of the world” and cannot be played past. Regardless, you must instead draw a transit card, and play passes on. When someone manages to play all their country cards, they win!
I’ve already mentioned how chaotic the layout of the resulting map is. There’s also a lot of room for adjusting the game’s difficulty, depending on the space you play it in. On the living room floor? You’re less likely to hit space constraints than if you’re playing on, say, a coffee table. And of course it’s educational! This one’s an all-around win for me.
