I really wanted to make a new, better-looking board for the game called Chicago & NorthWestern. I have the first version of the game from Winsome Games. There’s another version by Rio Grande that has a nicer board, but it’s pretty plain. Plus, it didn’t fix the most obvious problem I wanted to solve with my own board.

Let’s talk about the first board. It works fine and doesn’t get in the way of playing the game, but it’s not much to look at.

Since the most important part of the board is like a map with lines and dots, I started by making the board in a program called Gephi, which helps you draw these kinds of maps. I was ready to forget about making the map look exactly like real geography, because that wasn’t a strong point of the original board anyway. I even thought about putting Chicago right in the middle of the board!

Drawing all the lines and dots by hand would have been a lot of annoying work. So, I used the automatic tools in Gephi. One tool, called “Fruchterman Rheingold,” made the map look somewhat like a circle, and that’s what I went with. I still had to do some work by hand because some lines crossed over each other, and you can’t have that. I added some colors to the dots, and this is what I ended up with:

This looked pretty good! The map showed the east-west directions correctly, but the north-south directions were flipped. That’s just how the computer program laid it out. Even though I wasn’t trying to be perfectly accurate with geography, I still flipped the image upside down when I moved it to another program called Pixelmator to finish editing.

I was aiming for a simple, clean look. The main improvement I wanted to make was to color the cities where the railroads were supposed to go. This way, it would be super clear right away where each company was headed. I think it’s strange that the Rio Grande version didn’t fix this, because it’s a problem you notice as soon as you play the game with someone new. People always ask, “Where is Milwaukee Road going again?”

The cities on my new map got bigger or smaller circles, and I used different colors to group similar types of cities together. The train tracks are just plain black lines with little square spaces on them. These squares are for the small 8mm cubes used in the game. The original map had all the squares facing the same way. I made my squares turn with the lines, so they looked like they were part of the track.

Making the tracks was easy, but it took a lot of time. I had to copy a line and square, move the ends of the line to the middle of the cities, put the square near the middle of the line, and then turn it. I had to do this almost a hundred times!

The background of the board looks like old, light gray paper. To finish it off, I added a see-through picture of an old train engine. In one corner, I put the Chicago & NorthWestern railroad logo, and in another, there’s a nice old picture of a cow. This is where you can mark the “Gone West” companies. You’ll also see the same cow in the circles for the western cities. (The cities that are destinations have a small picture of a train station, and cities like St. Louis and Chicago have pictures of real places in those cities.)

I thought about putting railroad company logos right on the board to show where to put the company cubes and money. But I decided that would look messy. Instead, I made special cards, like poker cards, with bright company logos on them (which would have looked terrible on the board). These cards have spots for the cubes and money. You can also flip the cards over to show if a company has gone “Gone West.” It’s a shame I couldn’t make cards with three sides for “Special available,” “Special used,” and “Gone West.”

The board also didn’t have a quick guide for what actions you can take. I put that information on cards too. These action cards list all the things you can do and show if the “dividend” action is available. When a player takes the dividend action, they can flip the card to show that it’s been used, and then that action isn’t listed as available anymore.

Here’s what my finished board looks like.

The only thing that bothers me a little is how the names of the destination cities point in different directions. I did that to keep them from overlapping with the tracks. It would look nicer if they all pointed the same way, but that would mean moving the tracks around a bit.

This new map is much smaller than the old one. The original was almost as big as a large poster (A2 size). This one fits on a single smaller poster (A3 size). It’s not too crowded; it could be bigger, but I like how compact it is. It’s easy to follow the routes. The action reference cards also turned out quite well.

I noticed something interesting when playing with the new map. The red train line always built from Chicago through Dubuque and La Crosse all the way to Minneapolis. This happened both times I played with this new map. It makes sense, as it’s the most direct path to Minneapolis, which is the red line’s goal. But this also made the green line less appealing. For green, the best route to Sioux City would be Dubuque – Mason City – Sioux City. For red, reaching Minneapolis through Madison and Eau Claire would be the same distance, even if it looks longer. Because of this, the green line didn’t even get started in either game.

…And now that I’m looking at this more closely, I see a mistake on my map. There should be a connection between Cedar Rapids and Mason City that’s missing. That would give the green line another way to get to Sioux City in three steps. Oops! It looks like I missed a couple of other connections too, but those weren’t as important. The picture above has been updated to show the correct map.