Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 11:01 pm
Cartographers – Card Game Review
Cartographers is a Card/Board game from Brettspielwelt GmbH, first launched in 21st August 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 100+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Cartographers Stand Out
Queen Gimnax has ordered the reclamation of the northern lands. As a cartographer in her service, you are sent to map this territory, claiming it for the Kingdom of Nalos. Through official edicts, the queen announces which lands she prizes most, and you will increase your reputation by meeting her demands. But you are not alone in this wilderness. The Dragul contest your claims with their outposts, so you must draw your lines carefully to reduce their influence. Reclaim the greatest share of the queen’s desired lands and you will be declared the greatest cartographer in the kingdom.
Experience the fascination of this tactical Flip & Write game now as an App.
- Nominated for the Expert Game of the Year 2020
- Tactical Legendary Game
- Flip & Write game from the Roll Player universe
- 3 different modes with varying degrees of randomness
- Compete with players from all over the world via weekly highscorelists
- Collect Achievements and become the most legendary cartographer of all times.
Awards:
2020 Expert Game of the Year 2020 Nominee
2019 Golden Geek Best Solo Board Game Nominee
2019 Golden Geek Best Family Board Game Nominee
2019 Cardboard Republic Socializer Laurel nominee
This Card game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Cartographers is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 19th August 2025
Recent improvements include:
Improved login functionality in case of disconnection
Fixed bug with Underworld Extension
Fixed bug with ancient ruins
Fixed issues with scrolling through high score lists
Fixed display issues when restarting on certain devices
Download & Availability
Cartographers is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Cartographers on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Looks like bugs have been fixed, so we downloaded the app again, and Im glad we did. It works very well. Its challenging but still peaceful to play, just the right amount of tension. Definitely one of our favorite solo board game apps. Its awesome when you get a high score, you feel like you really achieved something. All for a great price with no ads or IAP, and a small file size, and its good on battery too. Thank you developer for doing things right and keeping it updated. Its very appreciated. We download your game Friday too. Also very good. Thank you.
We cant seem to edit our previous reviewso Ill leave a new one. Our previous purchases (expansion) has been restored. Enjoy the game very much.
The gameplay is pretty good as this is a rather simple game but the app is so buggy it just makes it annoying. Ive had: – the game be offset from where you click. In other words when we touched a spot in the screen, it would activate something two spots down (making the game near impossible to play). – when in the middle of a puzzle with special rules, if we had to go do something and the phone shut off, when we came back to the game the special rules part would have disappeared and the point system didnt work. – now its just telling us Im offline and cant log in or register at all. Our only option for play is the green gam and not yellow or red puzzles.
We enjoy the base game but almost every time we do the Heroes expansion, our game freezes up before the end and we have to close the app.
Waiting for it to count our stars and then our coins and then the demons is so painfully slow! It takes almost a full minute when it can be done in 2 seconds.
Edited review after some playing. Went from 2 -> 3 stars. Theres no tutorial so you just have to figure out what you can press on screen (e.g., how to resume a saved game). Not a fan of the monsters. You will get 3-4 monster cards in every game.
We love Cartographers and am happy to have a digital version. That said, the app is extremely buggy. It crashes constantly and the graphics periodically just disappear, which can only be remedied by restarting the app. Thankfully, the app automatically saves your game, so you can pick up where you left off, but it happens constantly, and it's annoying.
We bought it and was excited to play it .. On our ipad .. That is mounted to our magic keyboard .. Too bad the game is in the dark ages and doesnt orient to landscape .. Im not even going to try to play this game. Fix this.
We love the combination of spatial reasoning (placing tiles) and tempo (scoring rules that shift in known ways). The app is easy to use and fast to play. We love that several expansions are also available as add-ons. We dont agree with the reviews that say the app has bad randomness. As far as we can tell, it works just like the physical game. We have played the physical and digital games extensively, and they match closely.
We love the board game and have all the map packs and mini-expansions. So we knew we had to get the app version. The app is very faithful to the game and we have spent hours and hours playing it. The only tiny thing we miss is that the flavor text included in the rules manual for each scoring card is absent in the app. We love reading about the world and miss those little details being in the game, but we also understand it is probably a pain to figure out a way to include something that isnt needed. We hope the rest of the map packs and skills come to the app in the future! Ill buy them all.
Can we please get a pass and play option.
Huge fan of the board game, probably our favorite of all time. This app is awesome for bringing that to life in the palm of hand anywhere we go now (still better when playing with others but this scratches the itch). The game is great, the UI is amazing, and this just embodies all that is awesome about this game. We have one thing though, heroes dont seem to count as a terrain type for some of the classic objectives. Could fix this by playing with the heroes only objectives but figured it should be backwards compatible. Otherwise fantastic and looking forward to online play.
Cartographers is our fav its solo game at the moment and we were ready to rate this app a 5, but it wont let us play Heroes or Undercity. Every time we switch ll the setting the background shows the correct one but when we go to play it switches to jut the basic Cartographers game. It wont let us play Heroes OR Undercity. We would also like to not worry about playing online, how can we switch to offline play.
We love this game in our family and when we saw this we thought it would be great to play with people when we are not together. Would be awesome to see this in the game in the future.
The adaptation is decent enough, and we can understand not having online multiplayer, but not having pass and play just feels lazy.
-Cant resume previous games if you quit the app. – general bugs and touch detection – randomization seems to be an issue.
Love this game, however we have seen some technical issues that are causing issues. We have purchased the heros expansion from within the app, but we are unable to restore the purchase from another device. The restore purchase button just doesnt do anything.
The app functions from a gameplay standpoint but this app has the most laughable sound design Ive ever experienced, to the point it makes the game unenjoyable. First off, there is no background music or ambience. When something triggers in the game it will play these really bad audio samples that dont fit the theme of the game at all and were clearly bought or resourced from a generic music collection. The worst offender which is lol hilarious is the music that plays when points are being counted, which for some bizarre reason is like a foreboding synth wave track that sounds like it came from a 1980s B rate slasher movie. Like why would you play that music for scoring lol. Very amateur effort. Would not recommend.
Wowhow is this app for sale right now? It is incredibly broken. You cant tap the interface it is nearly impossible and the grid placement is off by a square! We have to tap the square ABOVE the square we want to place. It is painful.
If they simply state it in the description they wouldnt get a poor review.
We wish it was more clear that this is only single player. That needs to change! Feel like we wasted our money.
It does a very good job of representing the physical game. We actually learned how to play the physical game by playing the app, for the most part. The only issue we have with the app right now is that ever since the last update it hasnt been keeping track of games played, scores or achievement progress. Its minor and doesnt ruin the experience but we have lost several personal best high scores because of this issue.
App UI and UX are actually worse than O expected. Poor quality implementation.
Like others have stated logging in with the email you used for other games from this company does not work. They replied to us that this game doesnt use the same database. You have to first enter a username and once in the app you can link your email to the app.
Also, there is a bug where we play on our iPad and the sounds are slowed and lower in pitch and it sounds like some spoopy Halloween soundtrack.
Great game. The one feature Id love to see added is the ability to see other players end game states off the leaderboard. Every time Im like how did they score that high!? So that would be an educational feature.
Would really like to see multiplayer, at the least a pass and play and local games.
Pretty good adaption of the game. One area that needs improvement is when playing offline the AI makes stupid decisions of where to put the ambush cards. It does not choose the best location. It doesnt exploit open areas, but puts them near the edge of the board so some squares are already covered. The other option that is needed is there should be an undo button in case you make a placement error.
We have played this for three weeks solid. The implementation is excellent and the app works well. We really like the yellow and red options for the puzzles along with the leaderboards. Everything is clear, colorful and we like the intuitive rotation. There are some bugs that could use attention: music stops typically midway through a game leaderboards dont register – example today we reached a score of 60 on red (cards and goals fixed) and it hasnt registered – and we got scores of 57, 56 and 55 before that which didnt register either no explanation of how to achieve several goals – Example: defend against all monsters; Ive played multiple times to try to gain but the achievement is still greyed out so we dont know what Im doing wrong 10 Guild Achievement appears broken since Ive played daily and (we think) gotten well above this. (25 Guild could be as well but we are pretty sure we need this one first?).
1) love the app and have a lot of fun playing it. Yes there are things that could be done to improve but over all great job and as updates happen it will get better. 2) one thing we would love is the option to just use the app to play the physical version without having to use the sheets. (Use the physical cards, but the app will act only as a sheet) So that A group could play without having to use the paper up if everyone has it. (Similar to the welcome to… App).
First off, we are really enjoying this. We love playing the cartographers solo mode, so not having to bring the game with us places while still being able to play is great. We love the layout, it looks really great on the screen. Some minor things we hope will be added that havent been mentioned in other reviews. 1)Id like the ability to see our rank after finishing the game. Getting our score and then going back to the rules to see our rank is not a huge issue, but something small that would increase our enjoyment. Part of what makes this solo mode special over other games is you have actual goals you are actively striving to reach. Having it front and center on the score card would be great. 2)the monster and skills packs. Some folks may not be familiar with these, but having the option to use them really adds something to the physical game. Even if we had to drop a little extra cash to get these packs would be fine. Especially the skills pack which has added a ton of fun for us while playing. Now one thing that has been mentioned that we would love… Being able to play with other people. Pass and play, local play between multiple people with the app, or even an online mode. The hardest thing with this would be the passing the game to another player clockwise or counterclockwise. This could be fixed by just sending the players boards to a random player. Anyway, the game itself is wonderful and we seriously love playing, but with these additions and the bug fixes listed in other reviews would make this the perfect game for anyone into Roll and Write/Flip and Fill games.
One game started with a black screen there doesnt seem to be a way to return to the main menu an option to speed up the ui animations would be appreciated.
We were sad to find that this digital implementation doesnt have pass and play or online games. Additionally a way to use the app as a simple board would be greatly appreciated. Our review will jump to 5 stars if they add these features! Even if they simply make multiplayer based on a random seed (like the iOS version of On Tour!) we think the app would be greatly improved.
The implementation is overall pretty clean but there is little orientation for how to use the interface. This is especially problematic for something as basic as how to start a new game when you already have a game in progress. There is a prompt asking you if you want to continue but there doesnt seem to be a way to say No.
It would be great if the software worked better, but it needs more work before it is a descent app. We are returning it. 2 stars for the gameplay itself working fine.
- We have registration issues almost every time we sign into the game. 2. Every time he ruins card comes up our game freezes and its over we need to reset the game hope one of those cards doesnt come up. Im using a late 2019 iPad Pro so we know its not our iPad.
Its good if you are thinking about learning how the game works and if you are thinking about buying the physical copy. Dont expect anything more than that. Issues it has: -No online play or pass and play – you are just basically playing solo trying to beat your previous scores. -As people have mentioned, monster randomization and placement has no variety through the AI. -Sound design is seriously lacking. -It is buggy sometimes. -No tutorial – you have to read the rules to know what's going on. It is fun to play and the visuals are good, but the app just feels rushed and unpolished.
Only one mode available unless logged in. But to create an account, you need to read German. And even if you do create an account, multiple reviews reveal the online aspect is buggy. The game itself is implemented well, so hopefully they fix the other issues. We honestly dont know how they passed Apple review in the current state.
It won't recognize our previously registered identity nor allow us to create a new one and we're thus blocked from a lot of the game's promised content. We'll demand a refund if not updated in a timely manner.
When we play with the physical game and the cards are truly random, we very rarely get more than one monster in a row or two per game. Occasionally, but not almost every time. It ruins the game. Sometimes 3 in a row, usually the last round. Sometimes early on You either spend the majority of the game working around the monsters or they all come in the last round where you dont have time to do anything. Complained about this a year ago. Forgot we had the game, started playing again and was reminded how bad it was. We see that others have complained about it too. It would be great if it werent for the monsters being so ridiculously over done the other thing that happens a lot is getting ruins spaces right after the monsters where you cant fill in the spaces properly: Randomly and Occasionally would be fine but this is almost every game. Also, a true option for multiplayer would be appreciated. We wonder if the developers even pay attention to our pleas given that the same concerns are echoed over and over.
Every time we draw a marshlands card, we can not place tiles on the board. This means we get stuck at that point and can not complete our game. This is so frustrating. We would like a refund as this is currently unplayable. Im using iPhone 12.
Just started a game and 3 times the game stopped responding. We had to close the app, swipe to remove the preview pane, and start over again.
This is a great solo game. We have had it freeze hard a few times, fully losing our game in progress. We suspect this will be fixed with updates. We'd love a synchronous head-to-head mode against friends.
The gameplay itself works great but app is not very responsive and scoring is very slow. Wish there was a way to skip over the animations in each scoring round.
Solid implementation, however two rules errors: Monster cards should be added randomly. It should not be goblins only in the first turn Also farmland costs 1, not 2 in the print version.
It cant save the game automatically, after we finished 10+ games, only one game is going to our score board. There is no clear way to exit the game when you finish, click menu? Or? We thought that might be why our game record did not update.
This is a solid boardgame. We need more of them.
Not a horrible implementation, but there a couple of issues. #1. There seems to be an issue with the randomization. It seems like about 80% of the time, the first monster card to be drawn is the three diagonal one, or otherwise its the one with two separate rectangles. We almost never see on of the other two unless we get three monsters in a game. #2. If there is a way to quit a game in the middle, we havent found it. We have to quit the app and restart. #3. Along that line, if we accidentally quit the app, theres no option to resume a previously started game. #4. Some of the trophies dont seem to work – Ive definitely completed all 16 tasks but dont have that trophy.
We like the implementation of the game, but we are not as big on the solo scoring. We would like to see multiplayer. We also do not believe that someone could legitimately get a score of 130+ in the solo mode, so it skews the leaderboard.
Overall, the game plays really well. We really like how the game fills in the board and the aesthetics are great! Unfortunately, the registration system is broken if youve played another BrettSpielWelt game (for us, Ganz Schn Clever). It does not recognize our email address as being registered and does not allow us to enter our user name since it is already being used. Please fix this so we can play all modes of the game. Thanks.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.5
- Size: 46.94 MB
- iOS: 16.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Brettspielwelt GmbH]()
Last updated: 19th August 2025 | Genre: Card, Board | Developer: Brettspielwelt GmbH