Machiavelli (Merchant Prince series) 

The second game in the Merchant Prince series is Machiavelli. (Confusingly, the third game is Merchant Prince II.) In it, you play a merchant of Venice, sending out ships and caravans to trade between cities and explore to find new markets.

While the game could be played with a randomly generated map, that’s not the innovative feature. You see, the game shows you the entire world map at the start. Only, it’s wrong. Similar to historical maps of the period, the map is a guess as to what is out there, a here-be-dragons version of the world you’re about to explore. The map is pretty accurate close to the starting city of Venice and becomes more distorted and inaccurate the further you travel.

This is a fascinating feature for a couple of reasons: first, it better reflects historical exploration, where the places unvisited by Europeans had a history and place of their own. The merchant ships you send out in the game aren’t travelling into black fog, they’re chasing legends, rumors, and best guesses. Rumors of legendary lands are visually depicted. 

Second, and more generally, it gives the player more context for the world they are exploring. This is useful for a historical map, but its transformative for a generated map. The player can suddenly make informed decisions about where to explore.

Giving context like this lets the player learn about the world at their own pace. Instead of presenting the player with overwhelming detail, as world generators are apt to do, you can introduce concepts gradually. The player starts with a vague understanding of the layout of the world and can fill in the details piece by piece. It gives a systemic hierarchy to the information, in the same way that a visual hierarchy guides a viewer from the most important elements to the less important details.

And, because the map is wrong, it doesn’t detract from the sense of exploration. Does that island on the map really exist? Is there an undiscovered land just over the horizon? Is that legendary city really out there somewhere?

As you can see, the coast of Africa isn’t where the map said it was…

I assume the other games in the series also had this feature, but Machiavelli is the one I own.