Hello everyone!
I am a professional cartographer and board game designer. I have been making maps for over 20 years, and board games for just over five. My fourth signed game is called Seven Bridges, and I'm especially pleased with this one, as it is my first with a map!
From the publisher's description:
"SEVEN BRIDGES is a roll-and-write dice drafting game in which players explore the historic city of Königsberg, colouring in the streets they have seen on their maps. Points are earned by visiting different parts of the city, but the various ways of earning them are only unlocked by crossing the city’s seven bridges. The player who tallies the most points at the end of five rounds wins!
SEVEN BRIDGES stands out from other roll-and-write games because it includes a map of a real-world city created by a professional cartographer and the elements of the game have been creatively superimposed as a red 'overprint' layer onto the map."
A pre-production copy sent for evaluation.
The dice and pencils will be much higher
quality in the retail version.
A close-up of the game's map. The
publisher requested that I not post
top-down photos of the retail version.
The game is inspired by the story of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. In the 18th century, residents of the city would try to cross all seven bridges and get back to where they started without crossing their path. No one could figure it out, and the famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler later proved that it was impossible, founding graph theory in the process (you may recognize Euler's name from his number e=2.718, or from the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, in which NASA uses his centuries-old method to predict the trajectory of the astronaut's space capsule).
After learning about the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, I realised that there was a game waiting to be made. I found this wonderful map of the city by the German cartographer Johann Homann (1664 – 1724), and adapted it to the gameplay.
A portion of Homann's Plan Der
Stadt Koenigsberg centered on
the city's seven bridges.
In the game, players roll dice to determine what part of the city they are going to explore, coloring in those streets in the process. As you explore Königsberg, you pass by its buildings, landmarks and tree-lined streets, trying to score as many points as possible in the seven different items shown in the map's legend. You don't have time to see the whole city, but you have to try to cross as many bridges as possible! Because at the end of the game, you score the value of one item in the legend for each bridge that you were able to cross: If you only cross four bridges, you will take you best four scores; if you manage to cross all seven, you will sum them all.
For example, in this game that I played on the plane coming home the other day, I was able to cross six of the seven bridges, so I scored six items from the legend:
Street; footpath - 50 points
for a closed loop with 10 sides that crossed 5 bridges
Bridge; river - 36 points
for each bridge that you cross, fill in one segment in that scale bar (6 bridges = 36 points)
Landmark - 28 points
for each landmark that you visit, fill in one segment in that scale bar (7 landmarks = 28 points)
Building - 47 points
for each building that you pass in front of, score one point
Trees - 42 points
for each building that you pass in front of, score one point
Grid Squares - 11 points
wherever you extended a line to the edge of the map, you score the value of the coordinate next to it
Drafting - 27 points
the sum of the bonuses you earned from the column to the left of the map by visiting landmarks
I think that's about it! I'd be happy to discuss the map and the game in the comments. As I mentioned in the title of the post, Seven Bridges is currently on Kickstarter. I have seen other commission and commercial posts so I hope that this kind of post is also permitted. I only wish I had known about the CG during the development of the game so I could have shared it with you earlier!
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The Seven Bridges of Königsberg – A Stroll & Write Board Game on Kickstarter
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