Moreover, the camping player is allowed two additional movement cards from the deck. If the movement of a pawn ends in the same place as another one, then the pawn is just moved to the next space, sometimes giving surprising results. When a pawn’s movement takes him of the last place of a land tile, a new tile is drawn and attached, a card chip placed on it, and the pawn’s movement is completed. This can mean an encounter with the more frustrating parts of a cartographer’s life: ending in a swamp, or, worse, between the wolves! However, staying over in a nice village is also possible as an event, which makes movement easier next turn.

Of course, the aim is to end a move on a chip with victory points. When successful, this chip can be placed in a player’s chest and a scoring is performed at the end of the round. The scoring means that cards are given to the players depending on their position. The player in the lead (not necessarily the player who triggered the scoring) will receive three cards and the others at least one. The player in the lead must decide –without looking at the cards- how many he will keep in his hands and how many he puts in his chest as points. The player whose pawn is last always becomes two cards, but must put them in his hands. After the movement phase players may draw cards depending on the type they played: bronze allows two cards, silver one, and gold none. And then it is off to the next round!

The last round is played when one of the players has reached the end tile (the beach). This gives this player one last chip with four victory points. One last scoring and then the players need to count the chips and cards that – hopefully - are in their chest. The player with the most points wins!

You may wonder how they have come up with the cartographic theme to this game. Although ‘pasted-on’ themes are not unknown to the German-style board games, in this case it might even be called ‘miss-pasted’. No relationship with cartography can be found while playing the game. Instead, ‘Gisborn’ is racing game, while discovering very nicely illustrated territories. Choices to be made are the set of cards to be selected, to get to the desired position (no guarantee, of course), and which cards to keep after a scoring (when not in last place). Typically the kind of choices of a game that is meant for the occasional playing family. For this kind of players, the nice graphics sometimes hinders fluent play; the path can get rather congested at times, and it not always easy to see where one’s pawn will end after playing - for example - three golden balloon cards. Children will be seen counting the places with their index finger, thereby already giving away their intentions…