Ken Shoda
United States
Washington
Dist of Columbia
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My housemate and I tried this game without a gameboard (map).
We wrote down colors of all states on the paper and played the game.
The game was more interesting and challenging.
I had to think "Is Oklahoma next to Arkansas, or not...?" etc.
I think I will print out nice list of states by color for this variant in the future.
Have anyone tried this sort of variant?
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Dick Hunt
United States
Ovid
Michigan
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Your post (and this thread, of course) tickled me. First, this game is rather a boardgame oddity in that it includes a pretty nice "board" that serves no purpose in the game other than that of a handy memory jogger. You don't need to place any pieces on it; the only use it has is to save you the trouble of memorizing every state's neighbors. Of course, for most people, that alone saves them so much time and effort that the board ends up being just as necessary for this game as most boards are for their respective games.
You say the game is "more challenging" when played without the reference map? Holy cow, I'll just BET it is!! I know my US geography pretty well, but the idea of having to remember every state's neighbors without having a map to refer to would make this game downright painful to play for me. I'm certainly not knocking your proposed variant, but I'll never try it. On the other hand, I can see how it might make the game more fun for serious geography buffs like cartographers, teachers, etc.
What tickled me most was the way your idea started knocking over my mental dominoes as I began to imagine the challenges many other boardgames would offer if you tried playing them without their mapboards. Imagine playing Risk without the board, covering your table with little clusters of pieces that are approximately where everyone thinks they should be. Then imagine the arguments that break out--"this little pile of guys is too in Western Podunk and NOT Eastern Podunk! Because I SAY it is, dammit!" I suppose it might work on a checkered tablecloth if the players could agree which group of tablecloth squares forms the border between the two halves of Podunk....
Then I imagine that this is how Risk's designers started to develop the game in the first place--on Mom's checkered tablecloth. Then one day a light bulb came on for one of them, who exclaimed "Hey, you know this game would work a lot better and easier if we just played it on a big map!" Then the guy would slink away in shame as his friends jeered at him for being such a sissy.
Then I imagined things like mapless El Grande, mapless History Of The World, etc. Now take this silly notion all the way back to chess, whose Persian inventors were playing a game with these cool little pieces. They couldn't quite figure out what the rules should be until one day when they were playing it on Mom's checkered tablecloth.....
Just ignore me, and thanks for the laugh.
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Ken Shoda
United States
Washington
Dist of Columbia
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Thank you for the comment. Mapless version is not as bad as you think because each state tile has a shape of that state, so it is easy to imagine what is the neighbor states.
My housemate (American) and I (Japanese) know US geography pretty well. So we like this variant quite a lot and we will continue playing this way.
Your thought about other mapless games is very interesting. I didn't know that checkered tablecloth was the beginning of everything...
Now I am thinking about "10 days in checkerboard" 
Ken
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Edwin Nealley
United States
Ardmore
Pennsylvania
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Checkerboard... or Chess... or Through the Looking Glass, perhaps? (as in Alice In Wonderland).
THAT would be an interesting map to try to connect in one's head.
Of course, seeing as one could meet a nasty death while traveling, there might be a few alternate rules needed.
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Tegs
Australia
Canberra
ACT
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When I first played this game and realised the board is essentially just there for reference, the idea for this variant immediately came to mind. My US geography is way too poor to try it, but I'm sure if I'd played it enough I'd be keen to give it a go!
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