Cartographer's Toolbox - Creating Competitive Heroscape Maps

[mad_wookiee]

I've been running a series of posts on my blog that I’m calling the Cartographers’ Toolbox. I've decided to crosspost them here so that the broader community can benefit, since the links tend to get buried in my map thread. I'll add posts here as I add them on the blog.

I’ve been doing competitive Heroscape maps for a while now, long enough to develop a bit of a philosophy around the subject and an approach that I try to follow when designing a map. I’m also a tournament director and try to approach most of my maps from the standpoint of someone who has to get maps to an event, build them, situate them on a table that’s likely to be a bit cramped, rotate them through a series of players who may have brought armies using any figure in the game, and tear them down for transport home when it’s all over. As a result, I tend to design maps that are relatively compact, using as few terrain sets as possible, and balanced for armies of all types. And, most importantly, I want them to be fun and engaging, presenting players with a set of interesting decisions and a worthy setting for their confrontation.

Here’s the thing about maps, from a tournament director’s standpoint: a good map won’t make your event a success, but a bad map can ruin the experience for a player. It’s quite possible to have an event that uses mediocre maps that everyone still enjoys. So why bother going through the trouble of creating high quality maps? I think that a great map can bring out the best in a good player in ways that a mediocre map can’t. There’s a sense in which the map can be thought of as the third player in a game of ‘scape; many maps are passive, not demanding much of the players, while some make their presence known, at times working for, at others against a player. That’s the kind of experience that I want for my maps, and this series is about showing you how I go about doing so.

Links to Individual Posts:

• Know the Terrain
• Walk the Path
• Set the Goal
• Build the Foundation
• Tell the Tale

More to come...