Some time back, a Canada map was posted by fellow Canuck Ryan Amos (IntvGene). It was, in a word, fantastic. You can see the original thread and download the map at these links:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/130078
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/fileinfo.php?fileid=19741

As amazing as the map is, what is even more incredible is that Ryan posted a link to the original Photo Shop file so others could build off of his work if they wished. This was an amazingly generous thing to do, and I took him up on his implicit offer.

There were two obvious areas for improvement I could think of. First, my group frequently has 6 players, so I'd need a six player map to bring this out, which would necessitate another area.

Second, it just doesn't seem like a map of Canada if Yellowknife and Whitehorse (and to a lesser extent, Iqaluit) are omitted. My grade school geography from way (way!) back when have cemented the territory capitals in my brain. So I had to get a way get them into the mix somehow.

The obvious solution was to combine both ideas. To that end, I've added a section that covers Canada's North, with seven cities on the map. You can see my work in progress here:

http://www.themakis.net/files/CanadaPGMap2.jpg

At this point, I've pulled the connection costs out of thin air, and I'm looking for feedback on whether or not they make sense, or are in the right ball park. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Again, many thanks to Ryan for his original work and for his blessing to publish my changes on the 'net. When it's complete, you can bet that I'll upload the final version to the 'Geek, with the original Photo Shop source file posted to a site that allows large files.

Wow great work so far!

I haven't playtested the Canada map yet, and since our group most often consists of 3 or 5 players, I don't quite have the need for 6 players.

That said, your work looks great. It certainly fills up the somewhat empty North area of the original.

I'm wondering if the connection costs aren't a bit too hefty to be practical for game use (they sure sound realistic, I can't imagine building power lines in the ice being cheap). Just a thought, can't speak from actual experience.

On the other hand, since in a six-player game, you still play with five regions (according to the rules), I wonder why you can't play with 6 people on the original map; after all it does include 5x7=35 cities. The Benelux map is exactly the same in this regard, and it can be played with 6 (unless there's something I missed).

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the compliments. Ryan (IntvGene) deserves any accolades, though -- I'm really just building off of his hard work.


I'm hearing the same thing from my regular gaming group as well. I'll probably need to tweak the connection costs down, particularly for Iqaluit. It may have a ripple effect on some of the higher costs in the southern regions -- ideally I'd like the North to be more expensive as a general rule.


There are two reasons, really. One is silly, and the other holds more weight, I think. The silly one is that there are only 5 spots on the turn order track in the original map, and I'm not clever enough to just lay the sixth house in line with the others.

The real reason is with 5 or 6 players, we would always be playing the same five regions. With 6 regions and choosing 5, it gives the map more variety -- it's like having 6 maps in one.

I have adjusted many of the costs downward in the West (slightly) and North (significantly). I think this still gives each region own flavour, with the West being slightly more expensive than Central Canada, Central Canada being a mix, the Prairies being the cheapest and Eastern being mostly midling. But the downward adjustment of the North makes it more practical to play in that region. The adjustment in the West was to give it a greater difference with the North.

If you have comments, let me know. I'm always happy to hear them.

Here's the link again (with the new changes applied): http://www.themakis.net/files/CanadaPGMap2.jpg

My buddies and I are finally getting to play this. We're going PBEM, so it will be a bit slow.

This will appear geeky, even for here, but one of them has decided to write a tool to make things easier for us -- we enter the city coordinates and and connection costs it keeps track of everything for us. It even dynamically creates an abstracted map showing which players are in each city. It's all cool stuff.

The tool also calculates the most efficient route between cities. As a side effect, it detected many "unused connections" -- ie, connections where it was more efficient to jump through one or more cities than it was to take the direct route.

After some thought, we came up with new values for these links (and dropped some that we felt were unnecessary). The results can be found on my web page. It's still a work in progress and will need more tweaking I'm sure.

Comments are always welcome.

As I speak, I was working on separating out the original JPG into 8 equal parts in a Word document so that I could more easily print it out and piece it together.... looks like all my work is in vain, because this modification looks simply amazing. I think I'll definitely do this one instead.

Thanks for the comments, Nate. If you can wait a week or so, I should have a final version (or more final, anyway) ready. In particular, removing the link from Windsor to Sault Ste Marie exposed a deformity in Michigan which I need to fix, and I'm contemplating moving the Windsor - Sault export city to Windsor - Niagara Falls for thematic reasons (but what that will do the resource track may not be desired...)

Watch this space. As I said in my original post, I hope to make the source PhotoShop files available somewhere when I'm done so others can expand / experiment if they choose. Maybe not to the Geek (it's over 100 MB after all), and doubtfully my site (bandwidth police and all) but somewhere that allows large file postings.

Oh, and you might want to check out PosterRazor or other poster-making software. This makes it quite easy to break up large images across multiple pages and will produce a PDF. I plan to use this to break the map into 4 'tabloid' sized pages, which I hope to get printed at the local Staples (99 cents per sheet is what they advertise).

I've branched development of this at the aforementioned Export City move from Windsor - Sault to Windsor - Niagara. You can see this version on my server.

This has quickly become the front runner -- I like how it de-clutters the middle and extends things a bit North-South.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has a preference between the new one and the older one. And if so, why?

I have a release candidate now, posted in my image gallery at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/225974.



The biggest changes are:

- Moved export city from Kenora - Brandon to Sault Ste Marie - Kenora
- Moved link from Victoria - Prince George to Victoria - Prince Rupert
- Adjusted the colour in Southern Ontario to better contrast with the purple of Norther Ontario / Quebec, which will hopefully help my colour blind friend distinguish between those two regions

This is with 20% compression, and should be full sized. I'll see what I can do about hosting an uncompressed version somewhere for those who are interested.

Comments, criticisms and critiques are always welcome.

I noticed that the admins have approved the PDFs for download! You can find them in the Files section, or follow these links:

One Page map: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/fileinfo.php?fileid=26482
Split for 2x2 Tabloid (11x17) printing: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/fileinfo.php?fileid=26483
Rules Booklet: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/fileinfo.php?fileid=26484

As always, comments are welcome!

I like the variant that export cities are not available until the first Stage 2 build.