Hello everyone, first time here.  I was thinking the other day that I was never happy with the Risk board; things like the shape of  Ukraine, and with China having a population 5000 times larger than Iceland.  I thought I'd search to see if anyone had tried making changes and came across this website.

I've browsed the very interesting boards on this site - I particularly like the World reversed - but they seem to have different numbers of territories or hugely different topology.  I was thinking of keeping the Earth, 42 territories and 6 continents, but just altering some borders/shapes/names and using population and land area statistics to balance the globe better.  It will be subjective - lots of the USA was uninhabitable centuries ago but is now well populated, and Siberia may be more populated in future centuries...

So, just to check if anyone has any ideas or has already seen any work on this?

So that reply was only tangentially related and not especially helpful, but your question reminded me of it; and I thought I would share the laugh.

Ian James wrote:

Hello everyone, first time here.  I was thinking the other day that I was never happy with the Risk board; things like the shape of  Ukraine, and with China having a population 5000 times larger than Iceland.  I thought I'd search to see if anyone had tried making changes and came across this website.

I've browsed the very interesting boards on this site - I particularly like the World reversed - but they seem to have different numbers of territories or hugely different topology.  I was thinking of keeping the Earth, 42 territories and 6 continents, but just altering some borders/shapes/names and using population and land area statistics to balance the globe better.  It will be subjective - lots of the USA was uninhabitable centuries ago but is now well populated, and Siberia may be more populated in future centuries...

So, just to check if anyone has any ideas or has already seen any work on this?

@ Cramchackle: Too funny!

@Ian: Your idea sounds like a cool concept and a different twist on the standard risk map.  Can't wait to see what you come up with!

I've enjoyed looking at cartograms and have seen a few that would make nice maps -

From Wikipedia -

A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time or Gross National Product â€“ is substituted for land area or distance. The geometry or space of the map is distorted in order to convey the information of this alternate variable. There are two main types of cartograms: area and distance cartograms.

www.worldmapper.org

"In Spring 2000 world population estimates reached 6 billion; that is 6
thousand million. The distribution of the earth's population is shown in this
map"

Thanks All!  Cramchackle - lots of smiles for me in there.  Although I like Isaac Asimov and buy Organic?!  And I'll have to go an read up on the difference between Gall Peters and Hobo Dyer.

That population map is amazing.  Mongolia has vanished!

As you might guess from my tardy reply it may be several weeks before I have something to post.

Change of plan - I've designed a Risk map with 42 territories of roughly equal population.  I took longer over this than I planned so it may well be months before I do a land area version, if at all!

I made them all between 5/4 and 4/5 of the average population size of 164,188, so they are all between 200,000 and 130,000.  This meant splitting China, India, USA and Indonesia (and I split Canada too), which I did using their highest level of administrative divisions.  China and India comprise 8 territories each!

Country populations are at 1 July 2010 from "Total Population - Both Sexes" at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/population.htm. ; Division populations are from Wikipedia and scaled to match the UN country populations.

All comments welcome!  Here we go - my names, population in thousands, and specification:

Brazil            194,946   
South America        197,608   
Central America        197,527    includes Caribbean
Pacific to Lakes    182,437    West, Midwest, OK, AK, TN, KY, WV; Ontario westwards
Atlantic North America    162,092    VT, PE, coast from ME to LA; QC, NL, NB, NS, PE
Atlantic Europe        186,800    Iceland, UK, Eire, coast from Monaco to Portugal
North Europe        190,101    Belarus, Luxembourg, Scandinavia, coast from Estonia to Belgium
Russia            142,958   
Black Sea        150,754    Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine
South Europe        140,337    All bordering Albania, Bosnia or Austria except Germany
North Africa        165,907    Coast from Western Sahara to Egypt
Western Africa        145,838    All bordering Burkina Faso, Senegal or Guinea
Nigeria            158,423   
Central Africa        139,778    Chad, Central African Republic, Zambia, coast from Cameroon to Angola
Southern Africa        132,528    Malawi, Madagascar, all bordering South Africa
Great African Lakes    137,785    Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania
East Africa        141,975    South Sudan, coast from Sudan to Somalia
Arabia            146,963    Cyprus, all bordering Saudi or Lebanon
Central Asia        178,391    All bordering Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan
Pakistan        173,593   
North India        168,410    Delhi, Himachal, the border from Rajasthan to Uttarkhand
Uttar Pradesh        197,843   
Narmada            134,213    Gujarat and Madhya
Maharastra and Karnataka178,238    includes Goa
Tamil and Kerala    134,600    Sri Lanka, Maldives, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and Kerala
Andhra and Mahanadi    159,334    Andhra, Chhattisgarh and Orissa
Bihar and Nepal        160,838    Includes Jharkhand
Bhutan and East India 143,000    Bhutan; Sikkim, all bordering Assam
Bangladesh        148,692   
West China        157,818    Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet, Sichuan and Yunnan
Mongolia and North China169,910    Mongolia; Gansu, Ningxia Hui, all bordering Jilin
Japan and Korea        199,066   
Hebei            178,566    Includes Shaanxi, Shanxi, Beijing, Tianjin
Shandong and Henan    191,017   
Lower Yangtze        162,198    Shanghai, Jiangsu, Anhui
South East China    160,034    Jiangxi, Fujian, Zhejiang and Taipei
Guangdong and Hunan    187,449    Includes Hong Kong, Macau and Hainan
South Central China    167,912    Hubei, Chongqing, Guizhou and Guangxi
SE Asia            177,310    Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia
Andaman Sea        131,814    Sumatra; Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar
Java            142,302   
Pacific Islands        178,583    Rest of Indonesia; Oceania, Philippines, East Timor

I want to see what this looks like.  Do you have the images done?

Hi Ozyman, no not yet - not sure how to, I guess I'll get google maps and try and draw over the country boundaries

Ian, I have been trying to do the same thing with a board in development, but I was trying to do it with canada. (I noticed a distinct lack of canadian maps - can't have that) 

It's super interesting because there is a vast empty space in canada that nobody lives in (or like <0.01 person per square K) and a very small space that 30 million people live in... so the question was, how to simulate huge open spaces?  I did it some with unit limits, and some with small numerous territories for the places with lots of people.  I also gave more unit bonus for places that were densely populated.

Trying to get the gameplay feeling for what you describing.  What I'm finding though, is that "gamplay is like playing catch with spaghetti" to quote Yertle.  It's not very balanced, and has a weird strategic element. 

So, from a fellow trying to develop his first board in the same way, think about the strategy that will make your map fun to play, and trust me on this one, your probably going to have to sacrifice some accuracy to do it. 

Sweet world divisions though... I really dig the idea, and am excited to see how it turns out. 

Thanks ratsy,

yes, to begin with I split Canada (I didn't want to lump it in with West and Midwest US and have one territory touching both Russia and Europe); but later on I ended up being very mathematical and forgetting about gameplay.  So rather than a practical board my result is "Wow - people say England is crowded - wait until you see Java and Uttar Pradesh"

These are great. I had no idea Nigeria was so big -- 162M

the smaller the size on this the more populus, right? the bigger the more sparse?

ah Bangladesh. it's all about perspective. the entire population of the US living in the space of Iowa.

Cheers smoke.  Spot on weathertop - so Russia's the sparsest, mainly because half its population live in 10% of the land (Volga and Central districts).

Right, here we go with 42 territories based upon land area.  I tried to make them all within 20% of the average territory size, so between 2.50 and 3.75 million square kilometres, but the last one is slightly too small.  I've often used names of rivers or mountains where territories straddle countries.  Country data are from World Bank and exclude lakes.  Where I've had to split countries into territories (Russia, Canada, USA, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, China) I've used Wikipedia data weighted to match World Bank country totals.

My name, million sq km, and specification:

Tasman Sea    3.12    New Zealand; Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania
Australian Bight    3.45    Western and South Australia
Banda Sea    3.44    Northern Territory; Philippines; Indonesia excluding Borneo
SE Asia    2.95    Coast from Bangladesh to Vietnam; Borneo, Laos and Philippines
India    3.22    Includes Nepal and Bhutan
Kush-Zagros    3.70    All bordering Iran except Turkey and Iraq, plus Georgia
Arabia    3.62    All bordering Saudi Arabia
Kazakhstan    3.46    Includes Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
Xinjiang and Tibet    2.79   
Yangtze-Pearl    3.26    Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, Taipei, all bordering Zhejiang and Hunan
Huang-Liau    3.27    Nei Mongol and Hebei and bordering provinces
NW Pacific    3.22    Federal subjects from Chukotka to Primorsky; Japan and both Koreas
Yakutia    2.98   
Altai-Transbaikal    3.22    Mongolia, Altai Republic and Russian federal subjects bordering them
Yenisei    2.98    Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk
Ural    3.32    Volga and Ural federal districts, Tomsk, Omsk and Novosibirsk
Western Russia    2.80    Northwestern, Central, Southern and North Caucasian federal districts
Northeast Europe    3.38    All bordering Baltic Sea, Ukraine and Germany except France & Russia
North Atlantic    2.58    Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, UK
Mediterranean    2.91    Coast from Portugal to Israel, Serbia, Bulgaria
Nile    3.37    Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan
East Africa    3.46    All bordering Ethiopia and Rwanda except both Sudans and Congo
Zambezi    3.46    Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Madagascar
Kalahari    3.04    Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland
Congo    3.23    Both Congos and Central African Republic
Gulf of Guinea    3.30    Coast from Gambia to Gabon plus Burkina Faso
Libya and Chad    3.02   
Western Sahel    3.52    Mauritania, Mali, Niger
Maghreb    2.98    Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia
Atlantic North America    2.92    Coast from Newfoundland to Florida
Nunavut    3.01    Includes Northwest Territories
Yukon    3.01    Alaska, Yukon, British Colombia
Central Canada    2.61    Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario
Mississippi basin    3.68    TX OK KS NB SD ND MN WI MI OH WV KY TN AL MS LS AK MI IA IL IN
Western USA    3.02    All states bordering Idaho or Arizona
Caribbean    2.66    Both coasts from Mexico to Panama, Caribbean
Equatorial America    2.61    Coast from French Guyana to Ecuador
Inca    3.11    Peru, Bolivia, Chile
Argentina    2.74   
Amazon    3.32    Amapá, Pará, Roraima, Amazonas, Acre
Plata-Mato Grosso    3.22    Paraguay, Uruguay; Goiás, border from Rondônia to São Paulo
East Brazil    2.49    Minas Gerais, Tocantins, coast from Maranhão to Rio de Janeiro

And here's the map with the territories according to Land Area.

Ideally I think the board should be somewhere between this and the population version above.

Way Cool.

You could combine the two this way:

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/490-map-of-the-worlds-countries-rearranged-by-population