A good battle board is useful for large scale battles or for newbies. I created two 8x10 inch battle boards (one for attack and one for defense) that had photos of real-world units (printed at Costco and then laminated). I didn’t have time to find WWII photos for everything, so some things, like AC, are more modern photos. My buddies claimed they were a little confused because the photos didn’t match the game pieces, but I didn’t think it was too big of a hurdle. Ultimately, I would like to get WWII photos of all the units.
Also, I made the boards big because I wanted to use tokens to represent the units. We’re all big guys, and moving the units off the game board, onto the battle board, and back onto the game board is a bit of a pain. If you’ve got lots of dice or tokens, this seems to work ok. Next time, I want to build a tray (kind of like a utensil tray in the kitchen) with photos on the bottom of each compartment. This would hold the tokens better. But with a 2 year old daughter in the house, this won’t happen for another 16 years or so!
My cousin had a map printed that’s about 4x bigger than the original, so the only time we really need a battle board is at the end of the game when we have huge unit stacks.
When I get a chance, I’ll post the battle boards I made. Maybe someone will find them useful.
