For christmas this year I made my girlfriend a custom RISK board based on the world map from Avatar the last airbender (a great nickelodeon cartoon that her and I have been watching together... if you like animated shows it's a great one to watch no matter your age, although it is a kids show so it can be pretty cheesy)
anyway. I took an existing map that someone already put a huge ammount of time and effort into creating and used GIMP to trace and highlight each "territory" and continent. I added place-names, most of which are true to the series but a few I had to make up, and then made the necessary cards to go with it.
the game play is exactly like that of actual risk... you take and place your armies on the countries and attack other players' territories using dice to determine the winner. Once a player has conquered the world... the game ends.
so... here's my map.
the same map, in high res large format as a PDF is available on my DA page here:
http://spudafett.deviantart.com/art/Avatar-risk-422156631here is a sample of one of the card pages:
The others also available on my DA page.
This project wouldn't have happened if I hadn't came across this awesome piece of work that I pulled the base map from:
http://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/1izv6h/huge_map_of_the_world_of_avatar_the_last/So gameplay on this map is pretty interesting. I decided to add a few twists, if you've been watching legend of korra then you know there are spirit portals at the north and south poles... when they are open you can pass through them into the spirit world and then back through the other portal, basically enabling you to move from the north to south pole instantaneously. So I decided that'd be a good thing to add in the risk game.
by obtaining an entire continent you also gain extra armies to deploy each turn, so each color denotes a "continent" The air nation territories are pretty spread out and isolated from one another though so I added the rule that if you occupy an air nation territory then you could attack or move troops to any other air nation territory by "flying" to it... however you could not attack anywhere on the board.
If anyone is interested in downloading my pdf version of the map and the cards go right ahead and do so. Get it printed poster sized (I printed mine at 35inches by 24inches) and you get a great game board.
here are some "action shots"
btw, I bought the game pieces on e-bay used.
also... my g/f was uber impressed and ad no idea what I got her.... and we roped my family into playing after she opened it... took around 3 hours to finish the game!! lol
