Map Game
- Map game is a puzzle for two or more players.
- You need, obviously, a map to play with. The more detailed and obscure the map the better.
- One player is chosen as It. The It picks a name on the map and says it out.
- Other player(s), within a predetermined time (say one minute), take a sight trip on the map trying to spot the name.
- Whoever spots the name first within time wins one point. If no one can find the chosen name, then the It gets the point.
- Now the round is over, a new It is chosen and the game continues in the same manner.
- At the end of the game, the player with the highest points is the winner.
- It may or may not be the original source, but the game appears in Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, which was first published in 1844. And this is the game in his words:
"There is a game of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word --the name of town, river, state or empire --any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident.
