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[AdamH]

Well it's about time I want to go public with the blog. It's been recommended that I'm able to put out some content on a semi-regular basis for a while to start discussion. I'm thinking I'll publish all of the articles written so far (with the possible exception of the "Power Grid takes less than an hour to play" article) with the blog, and for my weekly-ish content I'll post about some of the specific maps, maybe some mini-articles.

I've been putting this off because not only am I less comfortable writing this content, but I don't know if I could fill up even a mini-article on some of these maps. What is there to say about the USA map that isn't already covered in generic strategy? I don't even own the four most recent maps because I haven't seen them at my local game store! (I've played a couple of them once because one guy in my group has them, but we almost always play with my set because it's so easy to set up, etc. and I have poker chips)

But I don't want to put this off any longer. I want to get this stuff going so that I can devote a small amount of time each week to adding content and see if this is actually going to take off. I'm hoping that once I get one or two of these going that the rest will be easy to write.

So what kind of articles do I want to write? Well I originally thought I was going to include an analysis of the map/connections for each one: "Germany is a relatively balanced, but more expensive board. Here's what this means..." but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make that into a non-board-specific article!

I was thinking about making a spreadsheet that compares every map in terms of a range of average connection costs you could expect to see (depending on which regions are removed) and also analyze the cost of resources compared to other maps. Does that sound like a useful article?

Well, OK that's great, I can probably write a good article about that, but then what else do I write about for each board?

I don't think I can come up with articles for the more vanilla boards like USA, Germany, France, Italy, Spain/Portugal, Brazil, Central Europe. I'm sure I could write something highlighting the changes in strategy because of weird rules in China, Russia, Korea, Japan, and probably Benelux, though some of them might be a little short. I still don't even know enough about the newest four maps to say anything about them.

This makes six articles to write. Are these articles useful at all? I'm not certain about the direction I want to go with this so any feedback on what you all want to see would certainly be appreciated.

[Shiroiken]

Something to consider with map based commentary, would be to consider each region that might be available/removed. The US board is much different with the cheap East removed and the West available. If the Northwest is gone, then there is a chokepoint in the South.

Also, while France and Italy are "vanilla" board (i.e. refresh per base game with minimal rule changes), the change in starting resources can have a significant affect. For example, in Italy, there is more Garbage to start, so the 6 looks like a great starting plant, but since the 14 is guaranteed early, and no garbage plants are removed, the 6 become less appealing.

[theory]

The articles for each of the maps can be as short as needed.  I think they would be helpful.

I don't know if this is feasible, but another strategy is simply to go through plant by plant.  Or analyze the plants in groups of five, and give them rough ratings.  It helps newbies to know not to buy that garbage plant in the first 10, but to go after that #4 plant or whatever is the really good one.

[theory]

Also for map-based commentary: starting positions?