WIA's Beautiful Game Map

[KG Erwin]

I've mentioned it before, but for those who are interested but haven't bought the game yet, the aesthethic quality of the game map is excellent. The non-hexagonal overlay of many wargames also helps in the overall appearance. It's just beautiful to look at and admire. It certainly helps make the game a pleasure to play, and also serves as a good reference while reading books about the time period. I've often said that the best games are educational tools, and BOA2 is a prime example of this.

[michaelangelo]

An astute observation; one shared by many as demonstrated in the following article written after the first Birth of America was published: http://www.ugo.com/games/birth-of-america-and-the-mapmakers-craft.

I'll provide a small snippet of the tastier morsels found in the article:

The map provided in AGEOD's turn-based wargame Birth of America, by contrast, contains volumes of information in just a few screens' worth of pictures. It's worth talking about this, because it is a masterpiece of information design.

Art Director Robin Pirez's and Graphic Artist Sandra Rieunier-Duval's vision of colonial America provides cues that put the player in the right frame of mind for approaching the game. Along the eastern seaboard are long chains of densely packed towns and cities, connected by ribbons of road that wind like rivers between hub locations. The map is a bright and cheery spring-green along the coast, and the sparse woodland is represented by stylized trees that look like a child's drawing with an upward curving trunk topped by a bushy green top.

But as you roll west, the land changes and the map's tone changes to match. The bright green grass fades into the burnt orange and browns of the Appalachians. The trees become more realistic, denser, and darker. There are no roads and a few miniscule settlements and forts dot the countryside. A little further over the hills and the settlements are replaced by sparse Native American villages.

The map also obscures political boundaries that artificially divide the landscape. While the player can overlay those boundaries with the press of a button, removing those familiar borders creates a strong sense of dislocation. We are accustomed to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Maryland being neatly divided from one another and those divisions are crucial to how we get our bearings. However, they also obscure the land, and in this game it's the land that matters and not the way it is divided.

The other point AGEOD's map communicates is the sheer size of the country and the relative isolation and tininess of the armies fighting over it. Many wargames use maps that are roughly sized to fit the combatants, giving the feeling of a chessboard that's just large enough to accommodate the combat. In Birth of America, the armies operate in penny-packets scattered across the continent. The moment the player takes stock of the "front", stretching from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia, and the paltry handfuls of troops he has to secure it, it forces a drastic rethinking from the linear approach of most wargames. The American continent stands ready to swallow up armies, and a commander who doesn't understand the need to balance caution with aggressive risk-taking will either lose quickly or die by a thousand cuts.

It's rare to encounter a game whose aesthetics tell you so much about how you should play it, and what AGEOD has achieved with Birth of America deserves attention. The increasing graphical fidelity of current-gen games has, to my mind at least, come at the expense of clean and self-explanatory visuals. Ironically, because the wargame genre is so niche and because AGEOD's resources are miniscule next to major developers, AGEOD was forced to create a stylish and communicative map that wordlessly gives the player a wealth of instruction.

I couldn't have said it better myself!