Theme Park Pointcrawls Part 1: Magic Kingdom

08 Feb, 2026

As part of Prismatic Wasteland’s new Map Bandwagon, I’m beginning a series where I analyze the map design of various theme parks through the lens of the RPG Pointcrawl. Why am I doing this? I’m not entirely sure.

There’s an amazing post by Park Lore that breaks down these park maps by rendering out all but the footpaths available to guests. These are beautiful, complex things that I love to stare at. Problem is, they’re almost too complex: A Pointcrawl is a means of abstraction that breaks down navigational decisions to a basic flowchart. It’s a very controlled form of abstraction, focusing on discrete nodes and defined paths. Like a theme park, it’s curated, it assumes an adherence to its rules and conceits. It’s my hope that breaking down these sprawling, complex themed environments into their most basic components can help us design our game maps a little better. Let’s get into some mad science.

Mad Science Step 1: The Overlay

My first step was to steal a 2024 map of the Magic Kingdom¹, put down nodes for each major “hub” and attraction, and connect them together:

To be perfectly honest, my process for placing a “node” is pretty vibes-based. The two vibes I was selecting for were Density, and Prominence. Large-density locations like Fantasyland and Adventureland were condensed into “Central”s. Some attractions are just given the Juice, like Pirates, Tron, and all the Mountains receiving their own little hub areas to draw your eyes. Haunted Mansion is technically part of Liberty Square, but the way it sits in its own little zone connecting Fantasyland and the rest of Liberty Square just gave it the sauce it needed to be its own zone.

I’ll choose to analyze this intellectual/scientific clumsiness as reinforcement of the idea that a Pointcrawl is a heavy abstraction, more of a mind-map than a “true” representative map. Even with a real representative map in front of my eyes, the decisions of where to put these nodes were heavily reliant of my own mental map generated by my experiences in this park.

Mad Science Part 2: The Simplification

Now that we have our pointcrawl, let’s remove the underlying image, fuck up those nodes through the power of Right Angles and see what juice we can squeeze out:

Alright. we’re cooking with gas now. Here are a few points I can extract:

1. Dead ends are nearly eliminated. We have two, weirdly enough both in Frontierland, in Big Thunder Mountain and Tom Sawyer Island².

2. I’m somehow only now realizing that every little “zone” has a hub somewhere. High-density points are needed to make a space feel natural, giving the contrast that makes these monolithic E-Ticket Attractions feel so special.

3. Weirdly enough, the hub kind of loses prominence. It is still notable as the point with the most connections drawn, but when you begin to abstract away size³, the castle hub no longer seems like the obvious point of transition between lands.

Should You Design Your Pointcrawl Like Magic Kingdom?

I think so. There’s a lot of great entry/exit points between lands, a good amount of meaningful decisions, very elegant loops that will orient your players in the space. That being said, there are a few elements that make this beautiful for a theme park that would take away from an exploration game.

1. The hub may be an overwhelming decision. 5 exits is a ton to drop on players right off the bat. If you want to reskin each node to make your own pointcrawl, I’d drop a few connections and/or make them hidden. Hide Liberty Square, remove the weird Fantasy/Tomorrowland bleed area’s connection to the hub and you’re already down to a much more manageable 3-point hub (not counting turning back to Main Street).

2. Related to the interconnectivity of the hub, assuming you are providing some details hinting at the adjacent nodes, you could hurt the sense of discovery by revealing too much at once. It’s helpful for a theme park to get an impression of every central land right off the bat, but may not be the most satisfying pointcrawl experience.

3. The train should not be running right off the bat. Make that a reward, like unlocking a fast travel. Easy fix.

4. Only one entrance/exit defies a lot of common dungeon design wisdom. Could always turn one or two of those dead ends in Frontierland into another entrance/exit, though.

And there we are! I’m still not entirely sure what I learned here, but I had a lot of fun doing it and hope you had some fun reading. Hopefully before this blogwagon is over I’ll be able to squeeze out another park analysis; let me know on Discord what you’d like to see next!