That's Pretty Clever! vs Cartographers: Which Should You Buy?

That's Pretty Clever! is all about the dice. You roll six, pick one, and write it into the matching colored area on your sheet, and anything lower that you passed on goes to a silver platter for your opponents. Simple, right? The magic is what happens next. Filling a box triggers a bonus, which triggers another bonus, which sometimes triggers a third, so one good number can set off a chunky little fireworks show of points. It's pure numbers, zero theme, and the art is famously plain (the kind of face only its mother could love). You're not here for looks. You're here for the combo chains.

Cartographers trades numbers for shapes. Everyone gets a blank map and a pencil, terrain cards flip up, and you draw them onto your kingdom like Tetris pieces: forests, farms, water, villages. Four scoring rules come out fresh each game, and each one scores twice on a rotating schedule across four seasons, so you're constantly juggling what pays now against what pays in two turns. There's even a little spite baked in, because the ambush monster cards let you draw a beast onto a neighbor's map right where it stings. Where Clever is a solitaire math engine, Cartographers is a spatial puzzle with a bit of bite.

Both games sit at light-medium weight, but they get there differently. That's Pretty Clever! has simple rules and the choices stay genuinely thinky, so the teach takes minutes and the first game already feels good. The friction shows up at the end, where there's some adding up to do, and in the fact that new players may not see the combo chains coming until game two or three. It's rated 8 and up, and that feels about right.

Cartographers is also light to learn, but it makes you plan ahead more than it has any right to, and reviewers flag that holding four rotating scoring rules in your head is a lot for a 30-45 minute game. Expect a touch of analysis paralysis when someone wants the perfect placement. It's a 10-and-up game, and I'd believe it. If you're teaching younger kids or a very casual crowd, Clever is the gentler first step.

This is where the two games really split. That's Pretty Clever! is a high-score chaser. Players rack up dozens, sometimes hundreds of plays hunting a personal best, and the tiny box delivers absurd value. It's genuinely brilliant solo and great at two. But at three or four you get real downtime while everyone hunches over their own sheet doing math, and beating your record still leans hard on lucky rolls. It even snagged a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination, which tells you how good the puzzle is, but it's a puzzle for one or two heads, not a party.

Cartographers goes the other way. Sixteen scoring cards plus double-sided maps mean almost no two games line up the same, and because everyone draws at once, there's zero downtime whether you've got 2 players or a whole classroom. That 1-100 player count isn't a typo. The one caveat is those ambush monsters, which split groups hard. Some tables love the needle, some find it mean, so know your crowd. Oh, and skip the included pencils; colored markers keep your map readable.