Line-Of-Sight Revisited: Card-Based Overland Travel

Land surveying is one of my favorite frames for a true-to-life adventure. It requires skill, dedication, time, and logistics. This is why it is a concept I've wanted to explore in the tabletop space for years now. I experimented with it as a framing device for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but the superheroics of fifth edition are pretty incompatible with the day-to-day decision-making of an overland survey. This past year I chewed on a bespoke system and playtested a few ideas, but I found myself constantly frustrated. The core incongruity I have been fighting is that surveying and cartography are the necessary first steps to developing a birds-eye-view map of an environment, but I could not conceptualize a procedure or mechanic that would allow players to start from a first-person view. It could have been a failure of imagination, but my ideas always orbited around some initial, known top-down map. This could then be translated to play for the characters, but it begged "what are…