Warcraft Community Chest & Chance sets!

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I didn’t plan to do any further work on my World of Warcraft Monopoly Edition board but a reader posted a reply about how they had printed the board and planned to use it! That alone was pretty exciting news as I haven’t been able to print off a copy to see how it looked.

Caterina35 said they (not sure about the he/she thingy, sorry, I didn’t want to assume!) had made up some deed cards and ordered figurines as player pieces. This intrigued me and I decided to have a go at making a set of Community Chest and Chance cards and again I got hooked on the design process! I’ve kept some of the orignal Monopoly instructions, though slightly adapted for the World of Warcraft theme, and added a whole host of new ones too.

World of Warcraft Monopoly!

As I enjoyed making the Monopoly Zombie Edition board so much I decided to make a World of Warcraft Monopoly Edition board.

This one was a bit more tricky than the Zombie version as I needed to rob a lot of different graphics from many websites. The hardest part  (or most time-consuming) was creating the overlay (the dark borders with the coil crests) and the parchment backing. Some bits I have yet to gel together properly but it looks okay for the time being.

EDIT 22nd June, 2012: I’ve just posted a new version of my World of Warcraft Monopoly board, click here to check it out.

Original Vanilla WoW.

I decided to keep the board to the original Warcraft game without venturing into any of the expansions, so there’s plenty of scope left to create Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm Monopoly boards. The graphics I found on WoWPedia were very useful as there are numerous .PNG files that I used that I didn’t need to edit out the backgrounds.

I tried to keep the streets in order of player/zone level eg 10-20, 20-30 etc, although now and then I strayed from this in order to use a good image. It’s hard to find images that look good when scaled down. Also I didn’t want to just use screenshots from the game and used original artwork wherever I could. The artwork itself ranges from the WoW Trading Card Game to original WoW art and also fan art.

Key WoW aspects.

I’m particularly happy with the Spirit Healer used on the Free Parking place. The stations are dungeons and I also liked the Barber Shop/Postal Service ideas for the utilities, although strictly speaking the barber shop feature didn’t appear in the game until Wrath of the Lich King, but hey, it’s my board, my rules!

The fonts I used where Morpheus for the main text around the board and LifeCraft font for the GO, both are freely available on the net, just Google them. Due to the amount of colour on this board I decided to use a white colour for the fonts to make them stand out, works quite nicely too.

All the images I used were freely available online. They were reduced in size, cut, pasted, enhanced etc. I’ve kept Community Chest and Chance but changed the images to ones easily recognizable by WoW fans. I’ve posted the entire board for you to take a look at.

Below you will see the complete board. Click it to view the hi-res version – it’s a big image and large file size too, but it looks sooo good!

I gave some thought to the houses/hotels as I was making the board. I thought it would be cool to have a standard Alliance house or Horde Hovel as houses and then either a Stormwind Keep or Orgrimmar gateway as hotels. Playing pieces would be cool to design too, plenty of ideas for those – swords/shields, race players, class icons like the ones on the Visit Trainer place.

Not sure I’ll rush into another World of Warcraft board just yet. I’ll try a different genre next, was thinking perhaps a Terry Pratchett board or perhaps even a Call of Duty one. I’m really pleased with how this one turned out, it has been a labour of love and no mistake!

Zombie Monopoly!

Recently I’ve seen a lot of new versions of the classic board game Monopoly. There’s the new World Edition, and Streets Edition with new 3D buildings, and even ones you can play on games consoles. I’ve seen tons of variations with different themed sets like The Simpsons & Star Wars, Disney, even a new one that uses an electronic gadget and credit card styles payments. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a blank Monopoly board where you can draw in your own designs, which is pretty cool.

I haven’t played Monopoly for a few years, we have the deluxe edition stashed away somewhere too. I’m eager to dig it out and give it a play soon! This post is about my own version: Monopoly Zombie Edition. I came across a hi-res image of Monopoly: Here & Now World Edition and because it looked very different I wondered if I could recreate my own board. So using Photoshop & Fireworks I set about building my own design. It has taken some time, and a lot of messing about with themes and layouts etc but it has also been very rewarding and great fun. I’ve always loved graphic design, in the past I’ve designed catalogues, brochures, business cards, websites etc, and even though I don’t earn money from that anymore I still enjoy the design process.

I used images freely available online. They were reduced in size, cut, pasted, enhanced etc. I’ve kept Community Chest and Chance but changed the images. Also the stations are now graveyards, the utility companies are now Zombie Movie Studio and Scary Movie Cinemas. Below you will see the complete board. Click it to view the hi-res version – it’s a big image and large file size too, but it looks sooo good!

As yet I haven’t given much thought to all the extras - money, property cards, game pieces, hotels etc. I guess the money could be the same, but the Chance and Community Chest cards would be zombie related to fit in with the theme. The game pieces could be bones or skulls maybe, something related to zombie movies.

I enjoyed making this so much I’m going to do a few more. As I’m a World of Warcraft fan I’ll work on a theme based around the world of Azeroth next. If anyone is interested I can post the .PNG file (Abode Fireworks file format) of the board I made so they can download it and build their own. It took some time to get the layout right but now it’s just a case of making alterations to the design. The only thing I’m not too sure about are the Paris and Hollywood places – at one point I was running out of good quality images with zombies in them. I considered using zombie movies posters but that would make it more a movie theme than pure zombie.

There are an unlimited amount of editions to make when you think about it, although the tricky part is finding images to fit the theme you want. I also wonder what this would look like when printed out at the right board game size. A standard home printer probably wouldn’t be able to do it so I’d have to take the file to a printers. Maybe, just maybe I’ll think about that at some point.

For the time being I’m happy to say this has been a labour of love, I’m really proud of this. and I’m excited about created a new one!

EDIT: 25th Feb 2011. Below is the .PNG version of the board. This was created in Fireworks. Click it to see the full size – 11.4mb. 2000 by 2000 pixels.

 

Editable .PNG version of the board. Click to view full size.