In Neocartographer, two players or teams of players compete, each trying to outperform the opponent in a mapping contest where a player gains an advantage by being the first to contribute a piece of information about a geographic location. The game belongs to the genre of configuration games, where players occupy spatial regions until they reach a winning configuration. In contrast to most of these games, Neocartographer challenges its players by requiring them to reason about spatial distances.
The game has been designed as a playful introduction to geospatial analysis, more specifically, to the concept of Voronoi neighborhood. However, there is also a game variant in which the players do not need to familiarize themselves with that concept. Neocartographer balances reasoning and action in an intricate way and is generally played as a pedestrian game. It takes a few minutes to get acquainted with the rules and the smartphone interface. With the game itself lasting about half an hour, Neocartographer is an ideal choice for applications where temporal constraints are tight such as a tech demo in the context of a scientific conference.
