ps.
If you use plexiglass, instead of stickers or a pencil, you are actually protecting your board instead of damaging it.
Keep it mint, and just write on the plastic.
You can even have the plexiglass cut at like 1/8th inch, and then put one on the top and one on the bottom, for a perfect preservation sandwich! This is how I store my AA50 board which is the most valuable to me and also the one I have HRed the most of any game hahah. Its the workhorse, so the plexi-makes for a safe way to store.
The main cosmetic tweak I made to my physical AA50 board (on top of the Plexi) was to include more VCs. Those are super easy, just a Red sharpie pen dot. But there’s no reason you couldn’t add in new territory or sea zone borders using the same method.
It may be advisable to retrace all your borders from the OOB map, along with any other critical info you want to highlight, and put that stuff on top of the Plexi for ease of reading and overall clarity.
To erase Sharpie Ink from Plexiglass you just use Rubbing Alchohol, so its super easy and very unlikely to rub off with your hand while playing, and cannot damage your actual map (since plastic is separating them.) Worst case scenerio, you get all “Sloppy Stalin one night”, spill a handle of Vodka all over your map! At least your actual board isn’t ����ed up haha, and then you can redraw the info again.
IPC values can easily be tweaked this way too, drawn right on the plexi with Black Sharpie, which I have done in the past, and then erased out later with rubbing alchohol later, as I always have second thoughts and third thoughts and fourth thoughts about everything.
:-D
Also, adding in a new Territory Name or Sea Zone designation is pretty easy, you just write it in by hand, or erase and correct with an alcohol soaked cotton swab or tissue, as I invariably misspell something by accident hehe.
There are also decals and paint that can easily be removed from plastic, but which would totally ruin cardboard. So I always suggest plexi to my pals!
Also I like to print a simple baseline map with colors that I dig, enlarge it to whatever size and then trace over the 1 pixel black line, with a Sharpie pen. Since I don’t really dig jagged edges, and this is a fun way to add a hand made touch to your borders. TripleA requires the 1 pixel border line to process the map, or anyway it started out that way, so it is my default. But yeah, I’m all for adding and tweaking stuff for personal mods. Just do it in a Plexi sandwich, with yout map in the middle, so you can revise it on the fly!
;)
Oh yeah, I also noticed that Evenki needed a re-draft in that color map I offered up earlier. I just posted a fix above, so that Evenki borders western China. This is rather a geographic oddity, but it’s a feature of the OOB map, so I guess you’d need it haha. The OOB map design took a lot of liberties with the projection, and squeezed in the middle pretty major (the whole Siberia/India/China section of the OOB 1942.2 map is highlight distorted to create an enlarged Europe) so it has a pretty high blob-effect. Here that effect is less pronounced, but still around due to the need for OOB connections. If you like messing around in paint, you could probably tweak it more to suit your taste, since you had plans to carve up the area anyway.
