Let me start of by saying that this isn't my original idea. I was truly amazed by the work of Steve Cates (ironcates) which can be seen in this thread: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/158174. Since I'm nowhere near patient enough to fully build his solution, I decided I'd try and re-create as much as possible in less time and with less effort.

I started by buying a magnetic whiteboard with a wooden frame and some magnetic tape. This cost me EUR 10.95 (about $16.00).



After that I re-created the maps of some of the standard scenarios using the online adventure editor. I saved these maps as a pdf and took a screenshot at 150% of them from adobe reader to get the maps as a bitmap. Each of these maps where then printed on doublesided photopaper, cut and laminated. The advantage of this solution is that you don't have to create tiles for the forest, mountain and waterways terrain and it also saves significant setup time. The disadvantage off course is that you can only play the scenario's for which you've printed the map.



After the completion of the maps I created the unit, war council and figure count indicator tokens. I used the flag images from the online adventure editor and added the arrows which indicate the nr. of figures left in a unit. this was a brilliant idea of Steve that is really the best solution in my opinion.



The images were adhered to the magnetic tape, cut out, and covered with 3M clear tape to ensure they would not be smudged or damaged when used.



Since re-creating all Lore and command cards takes up a LOT of time, I decided I'd just use the original cards instead. I found a suitable box (from the European Citadels expansion) to hold the cards and dice. For this project, I used the dice that were left over after I received new ones in the replacement program of Days of Wonder.



After spending three evenings on it, the project is now complete.



Some other noteworthy differences from Steve's project are:

- I use the marker that came with the whiteboard to write down the levels of my war council and the number of Lore tokens in the possesion of a player.
- The box that holds the cards and dice is used as a dice tray during play.
- Since my maps are doublesided, it would not look very good when I used magnetic tape to hold down the map. Instead I rely on the units and figure indicators to hold down the map and it seems to work fine.
- I used a picture of the figures to indicate the nr. of figures left in a unit.

I'd like to thank Steve for the inspiration for this project and hope this article can provide a solution for people who are either lazier or less handy then Steve or have less time on their hands.

Hey Matthias!!!

What an awsome job!!! Very inspiring!!!! I may take that a bit further and copy and shrink the cards down to 'small playing card' size. Truely and inspiration!!!!

Thanks for the compliment, but you have to thank Steve (from the original thread) for the inspiration. He has re-created the cards to a smaller size already! I'm just to lazy to do it.

Still looks cool though!

Cute! Whats the total dimensions and weight? Just out of curiosity....

Excellent work Matthias! I like what you've done with the order markers with the bigger arrows. I agree with your thinking about the cards after making them smaller I would still rather use the regular cards. Also, printing out a few scenarios will save you a lot of time and I think it's a good compromise because I usually just leave mine setup on a scenario that I like and don't change it due to the fiddliness of setup.

Wow, I inspired this

I don't know the exact dimensions or weight, but I suspect its a little bit smaller then A3, including the frame. I wanted it to be even smaller, because it's a Travel edition after all, but it seemed impossible to find a store carrying smaller whiteboards in my neighborhood.

I have made a picture that shows the board in comparison to the original BattleLore board: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/301722

I'm trying to find a slim carrying case (like they use to transport paintings) for it, so I can take it with me more easily.

If it wasn't for your idea, I would probably have tried to indicate the nr. of figures on the corners of the unit tokens. This would have been nigh unreadable! I did try to position the arrows in such a way that a pennant bearer turned vertical is still distinguishable from a standard bearer, because of the arrow direction.


And to think I just did it, because I'm lazy.


This was being lazy on my part as much as a conscious decision to save setup time. I printed out scenarios for a quick non-lore game in case I have to learn it to people first and then selected the scenarios that introduce mercenaries, Lore, Creatures and Advanced Lore. I'm thinking about creating a doublesided map with a scenario for each of the Goblin expansions (Skirmishers and Marauders) and a doublesided map for the Dwarves expansions (Batallion and Scottish Wars).


Yeah man, thanks a lot.

Matthias that is really great!!!

I think I'll do the same with Memoir '44.

Thanks for all of this, it's great

Thanks Spyros! Be sure to post about it on the forums here and inspire a lot of people like Steve did.

EDIT: and please send me a PM if you do, because I'm very interested in the result.

For all the C&C: Ancients players among us, take a look at this: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/294354.

Matthias,

I'm poking around with doing the same thing with the C&C:A maps that you've done here. When you play, what holds your map down on the whiteboard? Do you rely just on the magnets of the playing pieces to hold the map in place?

[Awesome work, by the way.]

This is inspired stuff. You both have done some great work.

Can you make me an Agricola Travel Edition? Pretty please?

There are several solutions to this:
- I chose to print out the maps for each scenario that I like. If you do this, you'll probably want double sided maps and it wouldn't look good to use magnetic tape on the map to keep them on the board. So I tried if the pieces could hold the map in to place and they did! If they hadn't I probably would have made the figure-count indicators larger to anchor the map.
- If you choose to create one empty map and create tiles for terrain, you could just use thin magnetic tape on the bottom of the map like Steve did.
- If you create the empty map, you could also rely on the terrain tiles to keep the map down. Since my unit counter were enough, I think this would work even better.

And be sure to have a look at Adrian's thread I mentioned above for a great example of a Travel C&C: Ancients.

Thanks! If you supply me with a normal Agricola, I guess I could look into it.

Actually my map is magnetic paper that gets printed on with an inkjet printer. I got the paper at Walmart.

I bet the magnetic tiles work great, but if you still have problems with the paper leaving the board you might look at picture triangles. They are small triangles of metal with one sharp point and one little pieces bent perpendicular. You use them to keep the cardboard backing into picture frames. If you had a wooden framed white board you could put in a few of these triangles, then slightly bend your maps when installing them to get under the tabs.

Oops .
I've never seen magnetic paper before, but Adrian also mentioned it at the other thread. Can you print both sides of magnetic paper? If you can't, then it still wouldn't be the best solution for printed scenario's. But for the 'empty map' solution, this would be really good!

Also, we don't have Walmarts here, which is a shame since many people refer to them when talking about storage solutions for BattleLore.

Thanks for the tip!