I am putting together a program that will add Summary Cards to an already created map image in the style of the Battle Maps, but would like the opinion of others in the community on a couple of aspects of it. At the moment it looks like this:
Currently it prints the same set of cards for both players. Can anyone envisage circumstances where it might be more useful to have different cards for each player ?
Also, it is limited to one row of cards per side. This gives room for 7 on a Standard/Breakthrough board and 14 on Overlord. I know that there are some some scenarios with a lot of different terrain &c. but does anyone think that multiple rows would be a useful feature ?
Thanks for your time and any feedback.
4 Likes
Well I love the idea of your program as it makes printing the terrain directly on the scenario maps. This would make a suitable piece of plexiglass or even museum glass a viable accessory and then we’re all one step away from using croupier sticks which would be especially cool. I’ve also been printing some boards (Age of Steam) out and laminating them so they fold up in a thin package, plus no need for the plexiglass, etc.
I cannot answer your question on summary cards other to say that the standard board would accept two rows, but then again might not need as many summary cards. The main thing to me is the convenience of not having to hunt through summary cards for what you need which is much more of an issue once you get into the bigger scenarios when you have all 100 plus summary cards.
I would try to standardize your maps so plexiglass might even cover a double map overthrough scenario. You don’t have to copy the exact sizes of the production copies, but it should be consistent. It may just be best to print out an extra player aid you store with the map that has the cards or the information rather than add an extra row. I have to say I don’t love the idea of two rows, especially if this information is forced to the edge of the table where you have to look straight down (poor ergonomics.)
In the end I’m not sure of the efficacy (as in printing costs and time) of your map project, but I do like the idea of a smooth playing surface with no terrain tiles that does not require one to hunt through summary cards to boot. I’m very far from an experienced player, but I think the advantage is strongest with larger maps that are onerous to set up with terrain tiles and experienced players do love overthrough scenarios. 
1 Like
Thanks for your thoughts, @Meles.
I have already made a different program which generates the maps from Scenario Editor files, and this is intended as a supplement to that.(I may even integrate the two at some point.)
The idea behind this is turn to an image from the map printer from:
into
I agree that it is most useful for the larger formats, although some regular ones have a lot off different terrain &c. .
I have made player aids for some scenarios, but if I’m going to the trouble of printing the map it is just easier to have them integrated. I wouldn’t expect too much need for a double row of cards for most scenarios, but always try to make this as general purpose as possible. I also think that 2 rows might be too much but might be needed on a very crowded Breakthrough board.
This also gives rise, I suppose, to another question. If the cards do not fill the entire board width, would it be better to have white space either to the sides of the cards or between them, or just repeat some of them ?
Thanks for your input,
Kian
3 Likes
I would vote for some kind of player Aid And this might be a good source Of ideas As it has been recently updated with the new flight plan. Perhaps some rules summary cards and play aids in card size chunks.
I gather that memoir 44 is a simple game that is complex in play And I’ve heard comparisons to chess. (See the book written on memoir 44.) So perhaps these alternate cards need to be a convenient so you’re not shuffling through all books Such as new flight plan. somehow you rank these cards and then automatically place them in order of importance With an option to print out the extra cards on a sheet. So you have a custom reference for the scenario. I almost say skew things so the most advanced cards are printed with the board and then newer players may print out additional sheets order. If some information is universal then maybe those are never printed on the map and you have a universal reference card sheet. So in the end I guess I’m suggesting a customizable comprehensive player aid system, the most important of which would which would be printed out in the empty slots for summary cards. I suppose the beauty of these type of player cards would be that it would be possible to program the appropriate ones to come up Rather than having to rewrite rules for every single scenario map.
I’m new enough to the game that I’ve only heard and read about the scenario Editor and I’ve not touched it. I just got 4 Printer cartridges off of ebay for like $20 and I’m ready to rollout. 
My holy grail project would be to print out D-day landings But that’s precisely the size of map that shouldn’t have Additional real estate taken up By summary cards. My 2nd game was Moyland Woods So I’m dumb enough to play larger scenarios right out of the gate. And for the record I’m dumb and I had to have a comprehensive collection with multiple copies of many of the expansions as prescribed. I don’t have any of the out of print items Nor campaign book volume 2. In shortI have enough to do any scenario Up through half of D-day landings. I have not played the game solo but that is next on the agenda so I can toy With the more sprawling scenarios.
1 Like
I’ve been soloing overlord quite a bit lately believe it or not and I’m interested in your map printing program. I’ll be receiving this week over 25 feet of non-glare glass to cover the various memoir 44 configurations. I want to do up to half of D-Day Landings, but every inch is precious in my setup so just stupid to cut up an intact copy. I’d much rather print my own. There seems to be little chance of reprint of campaign vol. 2 or D-Day. Amazingly everything else is in print. And no way do I want to have the cards enlarging the 48 inch deep D-Day maps.
I’ve been playing overlord preprinted maps and I do like the cards. If you’re going to print a map that is a huge convenience factor. I’ve got some condensed terrain summary cards from BGG which I like a lot, but they were not numbered and I printed them double sided (big mistake). Just spent hours ordering those and I’ll still probably be going nuts since the scenarios never list the terrain tile numbers etc. ; at least I’m becoming more familiar with them.
On the card front just stumbled over here when searching for Action cards and other non-terrain cards. I’ve decided I’d like those as well and even with preprinted overlord solo I’d still like to have the reference covering the side with the other language. And of course lots of them not printed at the bottom. 
I may have some ideas for empty space, but I doubt you’ll have any. You should still have an option to generate a printable sheet for cards that don’t fit. 
Thanks for your input @Meles.
I decided to include the function to add the cards as an option in the main program, which has just shown up on BGG. I stuck with just a single row of cards - surmising that if you are playing on the monster maps then you probably wouldn’t need the ‘basic’ cards. (Although your choice of 2nd game may have just proved me wrong.)
I shrunk the cards by a couple of mm so that I could fit 8 across a standard map and 16 across an Overlord one. (Surely that’s plenty.)
I have considered adding something which would print a separate sheet of cards - I just need to come up with a way to integrate it smoothly into the program.
Your reasoning about D-Day Landings is what started me making this in the first place. I copied them using the Scenario Editor and printed them out on normal paper so that I can fold them up as I please without damaging the precious originals.
Now I just love maps with huge amounts of stuff on and not having to spend longer setting them up than playing the game.
2 Likes
Very nice. Now I just have to figure out scenario editor.
I’ve not bought the scenario editor (and don’t know much about it.) Are you able to make extended breakthrough depth maps like the ones in D-Day landings? Do you have those shared (haha)? I’ve not found one of this depth in the Scenarios From The Front tab at Days of Wonder. I did see the first comment on your program say:
“Excellent job on this. I’ve been a long-time user of the python script, but you’ve taken it to another level with this app, and opened up the possibility of printing home-made maps for many fans of the game. The ability to generate extended breakthrough maps, and generate a nice looking medal track, are great additions.”
I just got four color cartridges off e-bay (three refilled and one quite old). The 2nd one had nothing coming out of it at all on the test pages haha, and the first I had to dip in water and then dog scoot plus run deep cleaning and finally it working. So I’m very game to print an extended breakthrough map. I had a few Age of Steam maps in mind when I bought these cartridges. It is not easy fitting maps to the paper of your choice. I’ve got a bunch of US Legal which may just come up short. At 14 inches two of them probably only cover 27 inches of printing, so half an inch short.
And I do know my map dimensions sir. I just got back with my special order of 25.67 square feet of non-reflective glass. Three 22x28 inch wide sheets and six 11x28. For triple map D-Day landings scenarios I’ll just put out all the glass. For breakthrough maps i use one half sheet and one full per map section (there are three overthrough scenarios that use 3 map sections.) The catch is the tile bed is 27.5 inches wide so with the D-Day stuff I may have a hex near the edge on the side with some staggered scenarios that has 1/4 inch not under glass. For the breakthrough expansions this is not an issue as the boards have extra margin so the hexes are too wide at the seams. It was a bit expensive and the glass is only available wholesale here in the USA, but for full D-Day landings a whole case might cost $125 wholesale so if you’re well connected in the art world it is achievable for the next get together. The main purpose of this for me is to be able to use plotter rods. 
just put glass in place and it works but I can see why some may not like this for their best looking Maps. i’m covering the regular tiles in the game it works very well:
1 Like
To make BTX maps my program uses one standard map (top six rows) and a full breakthrough one from the editor. It then combines them into a single image.
Once the image is output, if you want it to fit exactly under your glass, resizing it to only 1/4 inch shorter will still be perfectly playable.
The free program Posterazor is very good for chopping images up and will work out the best layout for your paper size.
I’m just not clear if any of these are viewable on the scenario editor. 
Would I need to make them from scratch? (Extended breakthrough scenarios.) Message me if you wish.
The editor only supports the Normal, Overlord & Breakthrough formats.
I added the BTX feature to my program to overcome the lack of it in the editor software, which gives you a blank canvas on which to create your own scenarios.
The image which is output is for printing and cannot be loaded back into the editor which uses its own .m44 format. The editor outputs a scenario in the same way as they appear in the manual or those that you will find in Scenarios From The Front on the DoW website.
1 Like
I still don’t think I fully understand. it just seems like so much work for extended overthrough. for let’s say sword beach is it allowed to save 17 rows of it into the scenario editor and then the user manual inputs the remaining six rows in your software? this would be kind of bad enough because if you miss one thing and print it out and then realize it’s missing you get to do the whole thing over again from scratch.
on the other hand are you saying you don’t even need to own the scenario editor to use your software for deep overthrough? I could download it now and start playing with it?
I was just looking at individual map images on board game geek to try to see if I can get some of the miniature counts or token counts like for landing craft and perhaps barbed wire and hedgerows as I currently only owned two base games (waiting for that steal of a deal on a third one.) I don’t believe days of wonder ever published anything for this other than the actual physical maps themselves which are quite expensive and they maintain will never be reprinted ever just like with campaign book one and the tokens (I suspect two will never be reprinted.) I actually need to post some very extensive token sheets for laminating that I’m currently making. Believe it or not it may be easiest to do the old air pack, just buy the PDF from days of wonder and the rest can be proxied, but I haven’t gone through every piece.
I actually have one for round tokens that I’m modifying and adding the large obstacle tokens. I am a bit confused as to some of the images on board game geek because they will show one landing craft with four infantry and a tank on it and some other odd combinations which don’t make any sense to me.
I would love to see some photos of your output on the table (hint, hint landing zones). i’m thinking it would have a different look from any of the pre-printed scenarios but does it match exactly what you’d have if you built with all-terrain tiles on a map? does it look better?
I also have to ask as a community are we ready for the day when days of wonder abandons their online memoir 44 resources? they may still bring out expansions especially if their new product release release sells well enough but they seem a far far away from sort of wrapping everything up in a bow as in offering expansions that fill in a lot of the missing links that we all end up print and. playing.
I just had an idea for an awesome program very close to what you’re doing but probably a massive step:
- not only output the terrain requirements as usual with a map, but actual miniature counts
- The pièce de résistance above this would be something that takes that and then says you need expansion XY&Z what is actually being used from each expansion (making it easy to evaluate if one can proxy their way out of buying an expansion for let’s say two tokens.)
- this would be a massive feature with scenario editor which frankly does a horrible job of telling you what expansions you need to play a given scenario. Well those looking to get into the game this kind of information it’s nice whereas experience people just have piles of stuff.
- it would be nice to have a tool where you input your collection and are told the counts you had of everything and then will tell you where you’re coming up short to play a given scenario before you even print it.
things could be so much better. I’d even love a tool that does a custom print out kind of like I’m doing with my sheet and tells me on the print out everything I own.
it almost seems like your program actually has access to all of this data and it’s just a matter of outputing it. maybe you just output it all on one map including the double roll of summary cards and then let the end-user crop as they will for printing. i’m no programmer but just trying to make this as easy as possible. it would be pretty awesome just to use your program not even to print maps, but to output requirements for scenarios in scenario editor. it might even be a nice design tool as I’m sure people designing scenarios don’t want to just go over the edge to require another copy of an expansion etc.
Both parts are created in the Editor. The bottom part is a whole Breakthrough map and the top is a Normal map. (The software just ignores what is from the 7th row down.)
It doesn’t send the output to a printer. It builds the map from the Editor file and outputs an image for you to print out. As with all printing - check more times than you think you need, then check again.
You need the Editor to create the scenario files.
The image here: And so the painting begins… shows a map I printed a while ago (without Summary Cards) and on the file page on BGG there is an, albeit resized and in jpeg format, example of the output with cards. You may judge for yourself.
The editor does tell you how may of each tile/marker/miniature you need and allows you to select which expansions are used.
To be honest, printing maps is kind of the point of my program. It isn’t meant to be a design tool. The Scenario Editor already does that.