Power Grid Africa Map

So I love playing board games.  Not just Risk and Life and old standbys like that but really the new wave of hobby games of the past few decades.  One such game, a favorite since I first played it, is Power Grid.  A game of economics, supply and demand, and budgeting and trying to power more cities than your friends.  The game comes with a two sided board with Germany on one side and America on the other.  There were subsequent expansions that included boards with more geographical locations and slightly tweeked rules appropriate to the area.  But, to my great consternation there was no Africa map.  Everywhere else, but not Africa.  An inquiry to 2F Spiel (the publisher) about a future Africa map got me a poorly translated "not a chance".  Of course, that was my perfect excuse to go all diy on this problem.  To the PhotoShop!!!

I started with a satellite image of the continent, which I overlaid with a map of the largest urban centers.  With this I mapped out my power connections between the major cities (central to  gameplay).  You can see an abandoned connection above Nairobi.

Step 2 was a big one, graphically.  The ocean got replaced with a textured color pattern and each of the regions got their own color.  These regions are also important in gameplay.  I carefully traced the boundaries between countries in each region to make a mask and then did a color shift to colorize them.  The whole landmass (including the non-Africa area) also received a filter, possibly watercolor or oil paint, to abstract out the satellite image.

Next I dropped on all of my cities.  Each one consists of city artwork swiped from another power grid map scan then modified to look less European (I think it was the Benelux map) and a name over a banner colored to match its region.  These are not exactly geographically correctly located but its mostly just a ballpark.

Here we can look at the cities up close as well as the connection costs, which were also scanned from another Power Grid map and pasted all over the map.  But this really shows how I built the power connections themselves.  First I laid down several strips of different colors and shaded them to look like wires.  Over that went a shaded grey bar to look like a pipe.  Those were placed and scaled to connect all of the cities.  Then, I used the eraser tool to remove that grey pipe in places and the cutaway was outlined in black; just to make the connections look colorful.  (it sorta takes ideas from other Power Grid maps).  Finally, some of the longer pipes got fancy brass fittings with rivets; again, inspired by other map artwork.

To finish it up the last few elements went on, including a frame from the Japan Power Grid map and "no nuclear power" icons which are both important to gameplay.  I also wrote a short rules sheet outlining minor changes to the base game but, alas, I have yet to actually print and play this map.  Hopefully someday I will, I'm rather proud of my little project.