Axis and Allies on a Fictional Map / Earth-2 (idea for a new A&A game?)

When I read this I thought of the boardgamegeek piece called: Games that made up ‘The Game’.

While ‘The Game’ is about game playing from 30 some years ago, I think you just might find a nugget or two from perusing this list. I especially like the idea of reusable territory names on changing made-up maps.

-Midnight_Reaper

I don’t know if this could be of any use for your project, but I’ll mention it in case it’s relevant. I once read a book about miniatures-based wargaming campaigns, and it mentioned a particular wargamer who wanted to create his own fictitious continent for a medieval-era game. He had few graphic design skills, but he was a creative thinker and he figured out an easy and low-cost (in fact, no-cost) way to carry out his project. (Note that at the time he was using 1980s resources, and that today this would be even easier to do with GoogleMaps.) He got himself a bunch of free tourist pamphlets and travel brochures containing decent-sized maps of lesser-known places within countries rather than of countries themselves – like the island of Corsica, for instance. He fitted them together in a way that looked attractive, put a large sheet of paper over them and traced their outlines to produce the main countries / nations of his fictional continent. The small awkward gaps between the map sections were put to good use by being turned into little independent principalities (like Lichstenstein in in real world). He used similar techniques to insert coastlines, mountains, lakes and rivers into his fictional map. The result was a large, attractive, geographically plausible continental map which looked completely different from the real world because its component countries weren’t originally countries in our world, weren’t originally near each other, and weren’t originally of similar sizes. Using GoogleMaps today would be even easier because you can scale its maps up or down as much as you want just by rolling the wheel on your mouse.

Personally, I’m having trouble grasping the exact concept that’s being proposed here. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but it sounds as if the idea is to keep almost everything about A&A intact, including the nations/powers which are fighting each other, but transplanting them onto a new world map that’s completely different from the world we know. I really don’t see the point, and I also have serious reservations about how this would affect the game’s mechanics because those mechanics draw heavily on both real historical events (like the Russo-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact, to give just one example) and real geographical considerations (like the fact that Japan and Germany are cut off from each other by the Soviet Union). Many of those elements would get thrown out the window if the geography of the world were different, which means that the idea of keeping everything identical except the map wouldn’t actually be feasible; many of the rules would need to be rewritten. An alternate world geography would also imply an alternate world history, which means that we wouldn’t actually be dealing with the same powers that fought in WWII. To give an example: in the real world, the major naval/maritime powers of Britain and Japan have in common the fact that they’re highly industrialized island nations located a short distance away from a large continental land mass controlled by long-established foreign nations. Would Britain and Japan have turned out that way if they were physically attached to Europe and Asia – like Holland (arguably yes) and Korea (arguably no)? I’m really not understanding what this transplantation idea is meant to achieve or what problem it’s meant to solve with the A&A game as it actually exists.

@thrasher1 Yes, you can make fictional A & A maps. You can also have variable placement of these fictional maps so that A& A games can have varying maps (to a degree). This is regarding a board game style variation. A computer programme generated random map would necessitate software coding to really have random fictionalized maps.