The Map

The first step in a Mighty Empires campaign is to make the map. One of the best things about the game is the set of hex tiles that it comes with, which enable a random map to be easily made in about 30 minutes.

To start with, you place a random highland tile in the centre of your table.

Then you place a second tile next to it so that the edges match. From then on, you can only place a tile such that it is next to two other tiles and the edges match.

The game advises that you sort the tiles into their types first, which are printed on the back as you can see, and draw from the appropriate stack depending on what edge of the map you intend to expand.

I actually have one and one-third of a copy of ME here — some friends and I back in the day went three-ways on an extra box of the game and split the extra pieces. So the map here will be a bit bigger than a normal game of ME, and there will be a few repeated tiles where there would normally be only one per box (I think there is one in this picture, at the top right and bottom).

A coastline starts when you are extending a river and draw a tile showing the river reaching the coast. From then on you can draw coastal tiles to extend the coastline.

You can also see that I bent the rules slightly in this shot and drew a mountain tile to "start" a mountain range again although there were no mountains edging the tile that I wanted to place. (The rules say that you can draw from a deck if there is at least one exposed edge of that type, and there is in the top left; but I did not place the tile there.) This is one of the weaknesses of the ME map system: mountains often peter out before you have used up all the map tiles. I think the tileset should have had a few more dense mountain tiles. This is more of a problem for my set as I have 1/3rd more mountain tiles, but the mountains are likely to peter out just as early as if I had no extras. As my map will be larger, I am happy to give the chance for a second or third mountain range to appear on the same map, whereas the original ME really expects there to be just one range in the centre.

Hmm, I keep drawing straight coastal tiles — I would prefer that the coastline had wrapped around. I think I need to rotate the map so that straight coast is along the table edge. Rotating the map is a pain with these loose hex tiles. The tiles with white dots on are potential capital city sites, by the way.

A long chain of mountains emerges on the west side, and a long river on the east. Because I drew so many straight coastal tiles earlier, and now keep drawing river tiles without a river end, the original mountains (at the top in this shot) have ended up far from the map centre. That is fine, and shows that although I get to choose where to place the tiles and so can shape the map to some extent, the randomness is having a large effect too and so this is not simply me drawing a map with the tiles as a palette.

And here is the completed map. I bend the rules towards the end by rifling through the coastal deck and choosing tiles to edge the map neatly — this is both a practical concession (I need the map to fit on the table), and it makes for a more fictionally satisfying map if most of the map has the sea as an obvious barrier (otherwise the obvious question arises, why can an army at the edge not go past the edge). Also, marvel at my improvised table: my living room table is 90x55cm which is not big enough for this, so I have some boxes piled at the side.

Although the ME map tiles are great, I may not play with the physical map. I think the tiles are a great way to build a map, and the miniatures are great too. But the map cannot easily be stored, and certainly not once you have minis on it. I think I will probably digitize the map instead. It will be more convenient to play the battles physically and keep the campaign virtial.

Here is the digitized version of the map. I manually composed this in an image editor to match the physical map, which took a while. I have not captured every individual tile exactly right of course; the physical tiles are all different (well, except the lowland tiles which are virtually indistinguishable) but there are many equivalent tiles, so I have just put in a tile equivalent to the one from the physical map in many cases.