Vietnam

In the Era of Cyberboard 2.0, when the pallete has only 256 colours available, Cyberboard designers made his gamebox maps using the drawing tools provided by CBDesign. You had to spend many hours of your free time if you want to get the virtual map with the same quality than the printed map. Of course, many designers did gameboxes with simple but useful maps that allows you play the game (and I will try to show in a future post a example of this).

But now, I want to show the other side of the story. There was several designers knowned for his high quality gameboxes they designed. One of them is my old friend Randy Stone that made about two tens of gameboxes during early years of 2000. Many ones are playing with his gameboxes designs, they still haven't been improved and remains as the best done of his game type.

The first gamebox I knew from Randy was the Vietnam from Victory Games. The zip file provides files for each scenario with a gamebox of only 1.3 Mb! If you usually download actual gameboxes you will see they don't low from 5 MB or even more, so I guess you can think how much ugly it is with this small size. You would be wrong! Randy, patiently, was drawing the original map in the gamebox using the tools for polygons, tiles, text, filling the cells with patterns, and so on. The final result is spectacular.

This image shows is composed with the three layers from the main board of Vietnam gamebox. Base layer has drawed the coastline and pattern in hexes along coastline. Cell layers shows the pattern of every inland hex. Top layer does the best, adding roads, cities and towns, text, provincial borders and beveled the jungle patterns.

Looking at the work of Randy I learned many tricks I used during my process of design my gameboxes: how polygons with transparent colour would be showed as polylines, or how click and hold the mouse would generate many points doing the polyline smoother. And how to use the tile tool to apply two patterns in the same cell. Yes, Randy, you was my best cyberboard teacher... although I never said to you until now.

The gameboxes of Randy Stone are available at Yodelling Crickets Download Page