I had never thought of doing this until reading a post on TMP. It was easy to put together and unlike Word or other programs, it's a breeze to move the units around (the little color markers you see on the map above).
The blue counters are American units (squares are BAR sections; triangles, flamethrowers; pentagons, bazookas). The red units are Japanese (various bunkers and rifle sections). The big orange shapes are rulers, for 8" or 4" (the two main measurements encountered in A Sergeant's War). I went for a very simple, quick map done up in Paint, just showing elevations and areas of brush. I superimposed the grid on the map as well; each square is 1" on the PP slide and 6" of "ground scale" in my game.
Nice, glad I could inspire you! Let me know if I can be of help.
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting your game---I had never thought of this before. Is there a trick to making background pics fit the board in a way that you specifically want them to? I tried with a space background, with a picture in portrait rather than landscape orientation, and it resulted in a background that was all zoomed in on one part of the pic.
DeleteIt was a lot of trial and error. Of course, it depends on the picture you're using. I often insert a screenshot from Google Earth for my games (PowerPoint has a screenshot insert feature). Then I save that slide as a BMP file and use that as the background for a new slide. That way I can't select the map as I'm playing, which makes things much easier.
DeleteSometimes I do use an image file, such as a video game map. In that case I do it in a similar way, by sizing the image the way I want it on a slide, saving the slide as a BMP file, and then using that as the background for a new slide.
Hope that helps!