New Royal Tank Corps game-map.

[timallen]

Hi all:

Back in 2000 or so, a wargame company called Moments in History published a game called Royal Tank Corps, on the battle of Cambrai in WWI. The counters were nice, the rules innovative, and the map awful.

I always liked the game, and for years I have been thinking of re-doing the map. Well, I finally did! Here is a image of the original. It had an almost cartoony feel to it, that I personally did'nt like at all. The second image is my re-design. Much more in keeping with the muddy WWI mood, I think.

I have already printed it out and plan on trying it out tonight!

[Lukc]

It looks nice, a lot more legible than the original. How does the game work though? Wargame? It looks a bit complex for my taste ... but I could be very wrong.

[tilt]

very nice... much easier on the eye than the old one

[timallen]

Thanks.

It is a rather involved wargame. I enjoy it, but then I'm an old grognard.

[ravells]

Hi Tim,

I usually love your map transpositions (and am very jealous that you have the opportunity to do them!) but on this occasion I think the original looks better to me than the new one in a few respects, but by no means all.

At this scale the 'caterpillar' hills look more credible than the new mountain symbols, I can't see any connection between the font you've used for the table and WWI, (maybe an old typewriter font would have been more in keeping?). The trenches in the old one are easier to see too, although I don't know if they have any 'in game' purpose. I really do like the colours you've used for the onboard chits, they stand out much better than old green ones, but I think the red 'half moon' symbols would work better if they were less saturated. If you were going for a 'realistic gritty look' lots of shell holes would have given it some character. Also the old map has sectors which are wooded but the new one doesn't (not sure if they have a game purpose, but if not, then quite right to take them out). I like your rivers much better, they're much easier to see although I'm not sure if the bridge symbols in the new map work so well. I think that in both maps the sector lines are too dominant, you could really dial those down while still keeping them visible. There are black squares in the old map (not sure what they are meant to be) which haven't made it to the new one. I'm guessing they're more than just eyecandy, but maybe your map isn't finished yet so they will come in later. It might be worth making your city buildings a colour other than green...perhaps grey, they almost look like woods.

Don't know if you're done with this, but if you're not, maybe it might be worth trying a stark b/w or an aged map look to it.

Hope this crit isn't too harsh, but as I said before, I love your stuff and there's probably a ton of gameplay reasons of which I'm unaware that have informed your design of the map.

best

Ravs

[timallen]

Thanks for the input! I think I am pretty much done with the map, so I dont know now if I will make any more changes. Let me answer some of the things you covered.

1. The trench lines on the board is nothing more than eye candy and mean nothing at all. Ditto for the woods.

2. True enough about the font. That one was hard to find. I did try a old typewriter font but it wasnt clear enough. I could always see about finder a better one.

3. The black squares on the old map are areas that stop line-of-site tracing for artillery. I replaced them with three brown triangles, which I had hoped would look a bit like stylized hills or high-ground. Guess that wasnt as clear as I had hoped!

4. Interesting that you found the sector lines too dominant. The original map i posted is actually one where someone had gone over them with a hightligher; one of the key gripes of the original map when if first came out was that it was too hard to see the sector lines. So maybe I went a bit too far "the other way", for game clarity, although I they work for me just fine.

5. Agreed that the half moon symbols (supply areas) and the red stars too for that matter (the end-of-game victory point areas) probably need less saturation.

I was planning on tweaking the map one more time, as the charts in the middle left are a bit too small. I originally wanted them to hold the game turn by game turn reinforcements, but they are just a bit too large, so the chart itself needs to be 10-20 percent larger. I will mostly likely look at redoing a few other bits as well, and will keep all this in mind when I do.

Oh and BTW, this is just a project I started for myself, because I hated the orignal map so much. Once its done I will probably post it somewhere like BoardGameGeek.com, but I would be surprised if more than a 1/2 doz people will ever use it. And thats just fine!

BTW, here is a couple of low res. images of the game map under a sheet of plexiglass and with the counters setup for turn one.

[mearrin69]

I like caterpiller hills but, other than that, I think your new map looks smashing. That green background/paper color on the original is just *wrong*. I love wargames: used to have a ton of SSI, GDW and AH games but whittled it down at some point because they took up a lot of space and I was never able to find players...and solo is only fun to a certain degree.
M