So... I have all the expansions, and I'm finding my poor little gaming space is coping poorly with the quickly expanding space requirements for the game. I've read people's suggestions, and some of them are good, but most are impractical for my particular situation.

That being said, my brother (who runs a digital printing press department for a living) and I are attempting to design a more space-saving game board. While the existing boards are gorgeous, we agree that there is a lot of empty space which could be conserved.

The problem we've been having is this: The spaces on the game boards don't scan or particularly well. Obviously they were not intended for this, and rightfully so, but it doesn't help our situation much. Has anyone else out there attempted to condense the board? Are there any of the game images surfing around the net somewhere that we could mooch for the purposes of adapting our board(s)? (or does that fall under copyright infringement?)

Any help or suggestions in this regard would be appreciated!

Just draw it smaller!

Osaka said:

Use Strange Eons to design it. It has most of what you will need already in it, then there would only be a few things you would be missing trying to recreate a smaller version of the Arkham Board:

* Background pics for the locations/Other Worlds (Abyss is on the back of GOO's, and I've seen the original pics for Graveyard and Unvisited Isle around the net, and there's probably more yet that I haven't seen)

* The Terror Track, but you could probably make a squarer version of that in Strange Eons

* The Oustskirts, Sky, Lost in Time & Space pics

You'd probably be able to substitute for the pics you can't find, there is a wealth of great art out there on the net, and as far as copyright goes, as long as you aren't making any money off the project and just keep it to yourselves I can't see anybody taking the time to chase you for it.

You can also check the following board on BGG: www.boardgamegeek.com/file/info/34707 .

The board looks like this:

I was going to post that BGG pic as well. Good call.

Kurt Miller did the artwork for the Arkham Horror board. So if all you want to do is scale down the size of the board you get the background from him as a print. Unfortunately you would have to do your own overlay to match the game. The artwork is at http://www.kmistudio.com/blog/index.php/gallery/image_full/75/

I love the Strange Eons utility! I'll have to track down some images to use for the locations though... I'll find them though.

I'd seen the smaller board from over on BGG before, though, while it's quite pretty, and definitely does the job of shrinking the board quite effectively, I personally don't find it's layout particularly user-friendly (the other world locations are all over the place, and the organization of the board elements in general seems a bit on the haphazard side) I was also kind of hoping to make one board that included the two expansion maps as well (or is there a third now?)

Oh well. Off to eat dinner, then maybe look for some appropriate pictures after. Maybe there are some good images I can steal from that old Call of Cthulhu RPG book in the garage...

Well, to help you out....

Graveyard: http://s226.photobucket.com/albums/dd78/weirdah_satanica/?action=view&current=coc_01a.jpg

****, can't find the Unvisited isle one again though.