Off-Board Sandbox

As boards become more complicated/sophisticated it often becomes important to implement “behind the scenes” functions to them, yet not having them visible during game play. This has been accomplished in a variety of ways.

1. they can be hidden in a board layer that matches the players' text colours, in which event all players need to be assigned colours with matching text colours.
2. they can be pushed off screen using the xml, but this loses the ability to easily edit them in the designer.
3. If the territory will retain neutrality throughout the game, and the game is always played with fog, then it would be possible to put it under a solid part of the board layer and it should never show through because it's never seen.
4. The creation of a “sand box” which would maintain the ability of the designer to organize his/her work in a highly editable fashion in the designer and then obscure those territories from game play once finished, yet bring them back into visibility in the designer if the need arises!

To create a sandbox for your board which can be added/removed at will in the designer, you will need to create two fill images for your board. One, for actual game play that matches the pixel dimensions of your board layer, and the second (the “sandbox”) for expanding the view of your board in the designer which is larger.

Make a second fill map that is larger than your board image. The extra space should..

• be added to the bottom and/or right hand side of your board such that the board layer still sits on top of and aligns with the fill layer.
• either be a clearly visible colour that differentiates where the board's actual fill area ends, or it can be transparent once off the playable area as long as some solid colour marks its furthest boundary.
• extend BEYOND a couple hundred pixels from your playable fill area.

Load your “sandbox” into the designer.

Once your sandbox is loaded, design your board with its off-screen territories by placing them into the expanded space to the right or bottom of your board.

• When using your sandbox, DO NOT place your off-screen territories within a couple hundred pixels of the board or else those territory's in-game numbers will still be visible around the edge of your playable board surface.
• Consider making and even labeling phantom territories for your factories on your sandbox image. This will make it much easier for future editing.

Once you are happy with your creation and want to do some development games then upload the actual fill area for game play which is not expanded for sandbox visibility. Those territories will no longer be visible during game play. If a problem occurs during your development games and you need to edit your off-board territories, re-upload the expanded fill image and make the appropriate revisions, remembering to re-upload your primary fillmap image.