Maps of board games

Abstract

The popularity of board games is increasing unbrokenly in the last years. Several modern board games work with maps or with maplike features. This article focuses on the maps and map-like features in games and attempts to classify the types of maps in board games.
The board games usually use maps on the main board. There are games that work with the map of the World in various map scale.
These maps sometimes look as if they would be old maps, or they represent the present world. Some games’ main board is like a map series or a classic atlas. Modular boards help to increase the replayability and give another experiences game by game. Other games work with tiles (square, rectangle or hexagon shaped) representing a terrain type (forest, moorland, farmland, built up area, etc.). The tiles must be placed next to each other, thereby the gamers can collect victory points.
Fantasy maps depict fictional worlds of the game: this helps the gamers to imagine better the fictional world and the characters. Fantasy maps often use partially orthogonal ad partially bird’s eye views. This article discusses games with special topic, or tools and it collects several titles of games named after a geographical object (city, land, etc.).