The WarGear Board Designer is very powerful; It allows for high levels of sophistication in both a board's visual aspects as well as its game-play. As such, the Designer is necessarily complex, having features that can enable your map to do things that ..well, haven't even been thought of yet. WarGear has an extensive set of tutorials already built into the site, so this page is meant to give the prospective map-maker some perspective going into the process.

Even if you are comfortable working with images, and maybe even have created a map on another gaming site, it is highly recommended that after familiarizing yourself with the Board Designer, you avoid attempting a large, ambitious project. WarGear's Designer is constantly being updated as it becomes more and more powerful, but as a consequence, some of its newer and higher level features can be tricky to control. Even experienced designers spend a lot of time figuring out how to work around unexpected functionality.

WarGear has a very active community of designers, and there are a number of very helpful people out there to help you with your map should you choose to ask for help, but prepare for a few unexpected complications.

Bottom Line: Its fine if you want to dabble with some of these more powerful features, but avoid attempting a first map that may require hundreds of factories, dice-mods, complicated view-only borders, etc. or combinations of these.

If you are making a map that you plan to make available to the community at large - one that will 'count' in the rankings, here are some things you should consider.

WarGear has a Review Board whose primary mission is to maintain a level of quality and functionality for maps that join the list of those available for play by the general membership. Their criteria is subjective in nature, and you can read more about it here as well as on the WarGear site but generally speaking:

• Avoid making another world map - WarGear already has a lot of them, and though a moratorium hasn't explicitly been declared, the standards for bringing in yet another one will be very high.
• Your map should have textured game-play. For a standard Risk-style map, this means a reasonable assortment of choke-points or dice mods, or some other features that give the game interest.
• Your map size should not be too large - players don't like to have to scroll from the map to the play buttons and back all the time.
• Your territories should not be too small - this is obvious, but it should be considered very early in the process. Think about what your map will look like even before you start working with the image.

You will need a good image editor that supports layers and can make images with transparency. Simple editors like MS Paint will not do the trick. Many of the designers on this site that have PCs use professional or sem-professional image editors that support “Layers”, such as Photoshop or Illustrator.

Paint.net is a very popular PC based editor with a number of WarGear designers, and it's free! Mac users should easily be able to find inexpensive but powerful editors like Acorn that will do the trick.

Most boards on the WarGear site use a number of images, which are then layered by the Flash or Native Player when the board is played. this permits fog to cover specific parts of the board, and player colors to mingle with semi-transparent textures.

should start with some simple 101 things like what i did in post #4 here: http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/2336p1/board_helpadvice

btw, how do i refer to a specific post (i know it can be done by tacking on something at the end like '/post#4' or something, but can't remember)