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Designing a board game

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I don't want to say much about it, as I'm keeping some of the concepts pretty close to the chest.  However, this will be a war game, and I'm trying to determine worldwide resource distribution.  Economics will play a relatively simplistic but crucial role in the game, and so I'm trying to determine the following resources:

Energy: this represents the fossil fuels, i.e. oil or coal.

Ore: this represents the metals to construct your war machines, i.e. iron and copper.

Cash: this actually serves a doubled representation, both as actual capital as well as manpower, i.e. higher population areas are worth more cash.

 

I'm looking for good maps online that could assist me in determining how resources are distributed throughout the world, but most aren't all that helpful.  I need to rather realistic regional representation, not merely that Iran and Russia as a whole produce a bunch of oil or natural gas.  I need to know population density (actually, I've got a pretty good map of this, but any suggestion is helpful) and industrial regions (i.e. Hong Kong).  Any suggestions/hints will be recompensed in the next life :)

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Sounds fun. I made a Star Wars board game, among others, when I was a kid. Every so often I think about a game I would like to make.

I'm finding maps of specific resources: coal, oil. You can find pretty good maps on the state level, using government websites like the USGS as a portal. The USGS website is such a mess, but I suspect there are useful maps lurking in it. There is also the eia.

Sounds like a pretty big game :D

The blue elephant in the room.

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If you ever design a board game where you are a dog trying to avoid getting eaten by President Obama, I'll buy it.

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Mrebo, the coal and oil maps are great!  Thanks.  I'll peruse the other stuff soon.

And Frink, I'll be sure to put you on the Ender's Games mailing list so you'll know right away when Consume Your Canine comes out.

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Ooh, I just found this site.  This map from there is helpful, and at the actual site, you can click on each continent to zoom in and make it clearer.