The GeoFacts Challenge is calling for games that teach geography.
How many of us only know where Winnipeg is because we played Ticket to Ride, or Kinshasa because of Pandemic, or Kamchatka because of Risk? None of these games are educational in nature, per se, and yet for many gamers, they have been more effective teachers of geography than a textbook.
Your goal for the GeoFacts Challenge is to design a game with memorable geographical information, whether it be countries or capitals, volcanoes or valleys, or annual caribou migration corridors. The game should use modern mechanics and a printed map with real location names. Both the map and the geographical information should be integrated into game play, but this contest is about fun—don’t disguise homework assignments as games! […]
Examples of strategic games that use a well-integrated map with memorable locations: Twilight Struggle, Sun Tzu (2005), Italian Rails, Axis and Allies, Pandemic, Risk, Terraforming Mars, the Ticket to Ride series, and certain cases in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. While most of these games use a map of the world or a map of a specific country, contestants are not limited to maps of this nature.
(Thanks to Alan for the tip.)
Meanwhile, the Map Making Mega Bundle collects the game mapmaking app Campaign Cartographer 3+ with a number of its add-ons, plugins and resources at a discounted price, a portion of which goes to charity. Despite the fact that it is in many ways adjunct to fantasy mapmaking, which is one of the areas of my expertise, I am woefully under-informed about roleplaying or computer game mapping, but CC3+ seems to come up a lot.
