Edible Maps

An tasty assortment of edible maps...

An exercise in map symbols from Ms. Welch's Class:





Marzipan Europe from Strange Maps:



A Somalia cake from Ms. Jimenez's Class (watch out for the pirates):



And finally, Catan Cake. An edible version of the boardgame, Settlers of Catan:



MMMmmmmmmmmaps!....

#268

The Mouse That Roared

The Mouse that Roared, a 1959 film starring Peter Sellers, based on the book by Leonard Wibberley, tells the story of the tiny, mostly forgotten country of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.



In the opening segment of the film, the narrator is trying to find the tiny country. Measuring no more than five miles (8 km) long and three miles (5 km) wide, the Duchy and lies in a fold in the Northern Alps, adjacent to France and Switzerland.



In order to resolve a budget deficit, the government of Duchess Gloriana XIII decides to declare war on the United States. They expect to lose of course, but expect their defeat to be followed by millions of dollars in foreign aid.



When the declaration of war is ignored, they send an invasion force to New York.



The filmmakers intersperse the scenes of this journey with map animations of their misadventures at sea. I just had some fun clipping these stills out of the video.



Without rehashing the entire plot, instead of losing, as ordered, the expiditionary force wins the war! Hilarity ensues. While not a map, this scene late in the film also caught my fancy. Regular readers of this blog know of my love for boardgames, so I was tickled by this scene where diplomats from Britain, France, the USSR and the United States, while waiting to cross the border, kill time by playing a boardgame:



The Mouse That Roared is an amusing little farce that showcases Peter Sellers understated comedic talent. Recommended.

Play With Spider

Play With Spider: "An experimental project to make a natural spider in Flash, combining math and graphics."



While it is fun to watch the spider clean up all the dead flies, I am distracted by the 15th century map of Europe.

Via Boing Boing

Zagria

Michael5000 has created a handy index to his Forgotten Lands.

Zagria
Capital: Brevogrod
Population: 6,734,232 (1995 Census)
Area: 38,860 km2
Literacy Rate: 98%
Independence: 1672
Per Capita GNP: $12,030
National Anthem: “To Zagria we Pledge”

Economy: Zagria is an agricultural exporter, especially of grains, apples, grapes, and cheese. A coal/steel based heavy industrial sector suffers from aging and obsolete factories and facilities and from international competition. Oil fields underlying the southern plains of Svisla province provide Zagria’s most important source of foreign exchange.



Zagria is an anomaly in Eastern Europe. In this region of the Earth, as in no other, countries represent the territorial aspirations of cultures. The Poles have their Poland, the Slovaks their Slovakia, the Magyars their Hungary, and the half-dozen former Yugoslavs their half-dozen former Yugoslav republics. Yet within this mosaic of nation-states sits heterogeneous Zagria. Polyglot (Hungarian, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian), religiously inclusive (Catholic, Orthodox, Islamic, and, surprisingly, Lutheran), Zagria is easily as culturally diverse as any other similarly sized piece of land on Earth.

For all of this, many observers find Zagrian society is disappointingly prosaic. Its many ethnic groups have neither walled themselves off into discrete enclaves, nor exhibited an unusual degree of mingling or intermarriage. There is little sense of animosity or contention between the people of this land, but neither is there any widespread sense of patriotism or national unity (Menillini, The New Nationalism).



Since independence, Zagria has gone through prime ministers at a rate of more than one per year, with parliamentary coalitions in constant flux and no political party able to maintain a stable majority. Post-communist economic stagnation and a widespread culture of corruption and bribery have created fertile grounds for a shadow oligarchy of ostentatious gangster-businessmen and their well-dressed thugs. To the average Zagrian of any culture, such things have long since ceased to excite much anger. “In Zagria,” wrote Brevograd’s great novelist Gnadyy Zvorić, “public life is as constant as weather, and as fruitfully cursed.”

Flag: Based on the shields of the medieval dukes of Zagria, the flag is a simple black diagonal through a field of dark green.

UPDATED 2008-08-28



#219

Railroad Tycoon

I have often written about my boardgaming hobby and games with maps. Many of my favorite games have a railroad theme. Currently, my most favorite game is Railroad Tycoon, and its sequel, Rails of Europe. In this game players compete to build the best routes linking cities throughout the eastern United States. Points are earned by delivering goods. But invest wisely, or you could find yourself so heavily in debt, your liabilities outweigh your assets, and you'll end up losing victory points. The game mechanic for Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame, is based on an earlier railroad boardgame, Age of Steam, and the game name and theme was licensed from Sid Meier's classic railroad computer game.

The game board for Railroad Tycoon is huge, and can accomodate up to six players. Be ready to use the dining room table, as this will not fit on a standard card table:



The quality of the components is exceptional. City rail links are created by purchasing track hexes. Once connected, certain cities will demand specific goods. Use your rail links to deliver the goods.



Rails of Europe is an expansion that requires the original game (for most of the components), but provides a new map, and can take up to five players. The cities are less congested, but building through the Alps and the Pyrenees offer new sets of problems to overcome.



#193

Crossing the Rubicon

Earlier, I wrote about my experiences in the Diplomacy Hobby, as a gamer and a zine publisher. This t-shirt was given to me as a wedding present by a couple of my old Dip buddies, Scott and "Goz". I suppose I could wear it to a tournament and not need a conference map...

Back when I was publishing my Diplomacy zine, Crossing the Rubicon, my friend, Bill Williams, designed this logo for me. I share it here because, knowing my love of maps, he incorporated an antique globe into the design. Bill had a special color printer that could make t-shirt iron-on transfers. Unfortunately, we forgot to reverse the image... so we printed it again and put the mistake on the back of the shirt:



I am using the old zine name, and the logo Bill designed, for a new blog I started last month. Crossing the Rubicon is primarily my boardgaming log, but I may get around to other articles about boardgames, and reprinting my old zines.

UPDATE: I later decided one blog is enough...

The Rubicon of a Diplomacy Player

One of the greatest boardgames ever invented, that uses a map, is the game of Diplomacy. Created by Allan B. Calhamer in 1954 and released commercially in 1959, Diplomacy is a strategic board game set in Europe just before the beginning of World War I. The game is best played with seven players, each controlling the armed forces of a major European power (England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey and Austria-Hungary).

The game employs relatively simple rules whereby each player aims to move their units - and defeat those of others - to win possession of a majority of strategic cities and provinces marked as "supply centers" on the map; these supply centers allow players who control them to produce more units. The unique part of the game is that no one player can win the game alone. In order to advance, you must make alliances with other players. However to ultimately win, it is likely that you will have to break that alliance, or "stab your ally in the back."

The game requires that participants are "good sports" and know that hard negotiations, and sometimes lying, is part of the game.

Diplomacy is also the first commercially published game to be regularly played by mail, and eventually by e-mail. At one time there were hundreds of postal Diplomacy newsletters, or "zines". The game is well suited to PBM or PBEM play, because a face-to-face game can sometimes take 5-8 hours to complete. I used to be very active in the Diplomacy Hobby. Recently Doug Kent, the publisher of Diplomacy World, the hobby flagship zine, asked me to write an article about my experiences for the 100th issue. I'll share that article with you here:

The Rubicon of a Diplomacy Player

Doug has been bugging me for months to write up something for his Diplomacy World 100th issue. For some reason, he thinks my hobby-life story would be interesting, even though I am no longer an active Diplomacy player. I also suspect I was one of the few hobby old-farts that he could track down that didn’t turn him down outright...

Like many of us, I started out playing Risk. I saw it in a Sears catalog and asked for it for Christmas. I must have been nine-years-old. This game soon became a staple for my Dad and brothers, as well as my buddies in the neighborhood. I loved every chance I had to play it, as much as I cringe at the thought of playing it today. But then sometime around age 14 (1974, and I still have a vivid memory of this) I walked into John Richter’s basement and saw a Diplomacy board with all its colorful pieces set. I was immediately intrigued. John told me that his older brother, Mark, played this game by mail. What a concept! I soon bought a copy and Diplomacy became my favorite game. Whenever we could get four to seven guys together (not easy when none of us drove) we’d spend an afternoon sticking knives in each other’s back. Risk was soon put aside as a boring kid’s game.

It wasn’t long before I was introduced to the postal hobby. My first Dip zine was Pelucidar, published by Burt LaBelle. I also recall a zine called Totenkopf and played Dip and Nuclear Destruction through Flying Buffalo, Inc. I didn’t get very far in any of my games. In fact I cannot recall ever actually finishing a game. I probably NMR’d myself out, and I went on to other interests (drama club, girls) and mostly forgot about this hobby. While attending university I dabbled a bit with an occasional Dip game, but also spent many years playing Dungeons & Dragons. It was pretty cool for college guys to play (and girls played too!) but I started losing interest when high school, and then junior high aged kids, started showing up? It wasn’t so cool anymore.

Fast-forward to the early 1990’s, married with children. I’m not sure how it got started, but at some point I got together with John (with whom I also attended college), Richard, Don, Gary and some other old college buddies. We would get together for an occasional Saturday afternoon game of Diplomacy, when the wives would let us. Also, right around this time I rediscovered the postal hobby. I don’t remember how, but I vaguely recall responding to an ad in Avalon Hill’s The General. I mailed a few dollars to the publisher of Zine Register, and received a large envelope full of Dip zine samples.

From what I can tell, I jumped back in at the tale-end of the “Golden Age” of Diplomacy zines. This was just before the Internet took over, and there were dozens of zines being published from all over the world. Soon I was subscribing to, and playing in, the likes of Doug Kent’s Maniac’s Paradise, Pete Gaughan’s Perelandra, Brad Wilson’s Vertigo, Andrew York’s Rambling Way, and of course, Diplomacy World. It wasn’t long before I got the itch to try my hand at publishing. I started out as a subzine of Maniac’s Paradise. Plausible Paraphernalia offered word games and featured PBM Scrabble.

In 1995 I moved from Michigan to Dayton, Ohio, and it was at this time that I became aware of the Hoosier Archives and the plans to save them from destruction. Walt Buchanan, one of the founding fathers of the Postal Diplomacy Hobby, had eight file cabinets full of zines from the earliest days to the mid 1980s. No longer active in the hobby, these cabinets had to go. Pete Gaughan began a campaign to raise funds to have all the zines shipped to him in California. This was expected to cost hundreds of dollars. Instead, I offered to drive a rental truck to nearby Indianapolis and store the Archives in my basement. This adventure was documented in an article that appeared in Diplomacy World #78, "The Pulp is Past, or How I Came to Be the Custodian of the Hoosier Archives and What I Found There." You can find it here or here. Apparently this is the most famous thing I have ever done, because if you “Google” me today, this article is usually at or near the number one hit. Eventually, the archives found a permanent home at the Bowling Green State University’s Popular Culture Library, in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Jamie Wins “Mr. Congeniality” (David Hood on the right)
It was also shortly after the move to Ohio that I finally decided to take the plunge and publish my own postal diplomacy zine, Crossing the Rubicon. CTR included standard Diplomacy, gunboat, and Colonial Dip, along with Scrabble and other word games. I also had subzines from Dave Partridge, Pitt Crandlemire, Scott Morris, Phil Reynolds, Andy York, and Tim Lurz. I worked hard to make it an attractive looking zine, and for that reason, Jim Burgess predicted it would be short lived, and he was right. CTR only lived for 16 issues. It was great fun, and I made many friends, but it just was a bad time.

During the two years I published my marriage ended and my job went to hell. During this time I also attended three DipCons, twice in Chapel Hill and once in Columbus. At least one of the Chapel Hill events was also a World Dip Con. It was at this event that I won “Mr. Congeniality”. David Hood called it the “Player’s Choice” Award, but it was an honor nonetheless. When David informally polled players throughout the weekend, one after another mentioned that they enjoyed playing with me. I also started my involvement with the Internet Diplomacy Hobby. I spent some time as the editor of the Postal section of the Diplomatic Pouch, and was introduced to email Dip using the Judge system.

Colonial Diplomacy at an Early Rubicon Games (clockwise from left: Jamie, Mike Gonsalves, John Richter, Joe Carle, and Ward Nahri).

The best offshoot of Crossing the Rubicon was that I started my own housecon, Rubicon Games. The first event was in October, 1996, and the attendance was very small. Four showed up on Saturday and another four on Sunday. We never played any Diplomacy that first year, but it was a start. I played my one and only game of Avalon Hill’s Advanced Civilization. However, by Rubicon Games II, I had a full house for the whole weekend. Several of my CTR subscribers made the trip to Dayton, from Louisville, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. There were FTF games of Diplomacy and Colonial Diplomacy as well as other board and card games.

Rubicon Games survived the CTR fold, and grew and evolved over the years, however by RG IV & V, it became clear that this event could not be sustained as a Diplomacy event. Since I was no longer an active Dip zine publisher, I had fewer Diplomacy players attending, and the gamers in the Dayton area have little interest in Dip. This was the time of the Euro games explosion. Every year, a new game would become THE game of the year; Settlers of Catan, History of the World, and Puerto Rico have remained Rubicon Games favorites. The annual event followed me as I moved to four different houses, and it has outgrown my space. So, this year I tried something different for Rubicon Games XII. For the Saturday portion of the event, I rented a large conference room on the University of Dayton campus. We had nearly 30 attendees and more than enough room for all kinds of games, including for the first time in many years and game of Diplomacy! In the coming years, Rubicon Games will continue to grow from a “housecon” to what I hope will be large regional board gaming event.

To be quite frank, my interest in the game of Diplomacy has waned. Over the years I would dabble in an occasional postal game, or more likely an email game. I am a member of the Vermont Group, played in several gunboat tournaments and GM’d many games for Newbies. However, I finally came to the conclusion that as a player, I’m just not very good at Diplomacy. In addition, when I have time for gaming, I’d much rather play three or four other board games in the time that I can play one game of Diplomacy.

In Dayton, I have been the coordinator for Game-Day: the Dayton Area Boardgaming Society. We meet 4-5 times per month at several locations in the Dayton area and play every sort of board game: Euros, Mayfair rail games, war games, and card games. This group, and Rubicon Games, will continue to be my Hobby focus. Yet I will always treasure my experiences in the Diplomacy Hobby, the good times and the good friends I made. Congratulations to Diplomacy World and it’s 100th issue.

Here I Stand - Antike

I recently played two different boardgames that make use of a map of Europe:

Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation 1517-1555 covers the political and religious conflicts of early 16th Century Europe. While I have been generally reluctant to play some of the more "heavy duty" wargames that are published by GMT, I appreciated that this one is card driven, and not only about conquest. It integrates religion, politics, economics and diplomacy. In this game, I played France, and spent most of the game embroiled in conflict with The Pope over control of Northern Italy. My mistake was making peace with Great Britain. Without the French as a constant pain in their side, they were able to make the necessary political, military and religious advances that gave them the game.

This is one I will like to try again.

Also played Antike, one of my favorites. This civilization building game focuses on the ancient peoples surrounding the Mediterranean Sea (however, if you flip the game board, you get a whole new map focusing on the ancient Middle East!). To win, civilizations must not only gain territory on the map, but also develop new technologies such as road building and navigation as well as trade and monument building. Another unique feature of this game is the use of the "roundel" instead of rolling dice. See Antike on BoardGameGeek for more details of the game and its mechanic.

As Phoenicia, I probably should not have won this one. I made several poor choices but was still able to stay even or one step ahead of the Germanic horde. Greece, stuck in the middle of the board, built too many of his temples too close to me. I was able to destroy two of them for some quick end-of-game victory points. (Note the Ohio Quilt in the background...)

Maps on Magazine Covers

An assortment of maps on magazine covers from my collection:

If you want to demonstrate your "global reach"... put a globe on your cover...











While I suppose it is not suprising to find a map on the cover of the Journal of Geography... I particularly liked this "melting Earth" image... (see global warming).



If you want to tell your readers "we're covering the news" put a map on the cover:



Map in an editorial cartoon on a cover:



Like the recent Time magazine cover, here is a map on the body to imply how "widespread" a disease can be:

The Clumsiest People in Europe

Neither of the books in this post are about maps, but they make clever use of maps for their covers.

The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, edited by Todd Pruzan.

When I first started browsing through this book, I was not convinced that it wasn't all a hoax (not unlike the Flashman Papers). Mrs. Mortimer does not have many good things to say about people she has never met, and places she has never been:

"It would be well if the Germans were more neat and clean, especially the poor ones."

"The Turks are so grave that they look wise. But how can lazy people really be wise?"

"Washington is one of the most desolate cities in the world."

Her outrageous statements seemed to good to be true. Then I did some checking. It appears that Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer was in fact an author in Victorian England. She was best known for her series of children's books.

But of course, it was not the content of the book that caught my eye, so much as the cover. Click on the image above and look sideways. The countries of Europe have been relabeled with their supposed attributes. Germany is "Unclean", Austria is "Coughing", and Romania is "Robbers". On the plus side, Iceland is "Harmless".

Built for Growth: Expanding Your Business Around the Corner or Across the Globe, by Arthur Rubinfeld.

How to make your business the next Starbucks. I'm sure you need more than a map, pins and some string... but its not a bad start...