Americana - Map

Almost a year ago now, I took a course in game design. The basis of the class was that we developed and built a prototype for a new boardgame to a given theme each week. Making a game a week is not a very easy task. The actual class time, though, was spent playing everyone's games. It was probably one of the most challenging and yet most fun classes I've taken.

Americana was my final project. A roleplaying game taking place in a world made entirely of American cliches, separated into their own isolated 'states' so to speak. Only the Great Train, driven by Americana's 'caretaker' John Walker, can cross the boundaries. When the lands begin to be overrun by a new terror group, the Televangelists, John Walker takes the train to each territory and gathers two individuals from each to join him in the fight against the invaders. The gameplay is as most RPGs are. There are characters and stats and locations and abilities and weapons and all that stuff. There's a 17 page manual and a 22 page module for the game that I can't quite care to read again. In all honesty, I think I got a total of about 5 hours of sleep in the week I made this and the whole thing is a total blur.

This is the map of Americana. It was printed on nice matte paper that I hand stained with tea and then singed on the edges and a couple places in the middle. The version I'm uploading is just the printed vectors on top of a texture...so it's fake. But that's actually basically what it looks like in real life too.