Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Fourteen Feet of Map (I said "fourteen")

One thing everyone hates... a lazy mapmaker. What excuse can I have for nothing new? Getting old... everybody gets old.  Aging eyesight... computers are killing all of our vision. Work keeping me down... welcome to adulthood.

I have no excuses.

But what I do have is a 14 foot by 2 foot map and I feel that more than makes up for it.



My corner of the world had two venues about a mile apart from each other: one a dark, dusty bookstore that dripped nostalgia, the other one was bright and modern and ran by the local hipsters. I am the judge at the hipster venue.

We had a good thing going, I ran a 10:30 AM Saturday morning game with a great group of regulars. We then all went to the 1:30 PM game at the dusty bookstore. We had it good. 
That bookstore lost its lease after 33 1/3 years of operations and double game Saturdays with a quick lunch at the Chinese buffet looked like history. I didn't want to break up the group so I added an occasionally second game to my Saturday lineup to help keep the camaraderie going.

What I wanted to do was add a special value for that second game and early on I felt giant battle royales would be the way to go.

So I hit the Excel in the spring. Yup most of my maps start in Excel. I print them (I printed this on a bad ink day) and hang on to the design for a few weeks. Eventually inspiration hits and I flesh out the full map.

Work and life got in the way but I really hunkered down in late June and started working on this 14 feet gaming beast.

Thanks to eSigns, they turned this leviathan into reality and it was delivered today.

We're taking the test run this Saturday at 1:30 PM. Over the next few days, I will keep you posted on how the game went and provide better pictures of each section.

Thank you for reading!


-CL