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Warrior Knights of Iraq (أمراء حرب العراق)
This board game example was inspired by Games Workshop’s original Warrior Knights. The Arabic map labels should be accurate but a native speaker may find the language in the combat and siege tables a bit curious. This is a game board, not a map: the city positions, rivers and mountains have all been greatly distorted (sacrificed for game play).
Where possible, caricatures of some of the cities’ famous buildings are included. I’ve done this for Basra, Urfa, Isfahan, Hamadan, Mecca, Tabriz, Alexandria, and a few others. Some of the cities exist today and others (like Shah Haffar) do not. All of the cities east of the Zagros Mountains (Tabriz, Qazvin, Hamadan and Isfahan) are part of modern-day Iran. And the city of Linah (in the bottom-left) is in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
A true-color satellite image of Iraq (seen below) served as a palette for coloring the game board’s backdrop.
Modified Rules
The original Warrior Knights included home castle locations for each knight. They have been ommitted from this version. Refer instead, to the tribal homelands illustration.
The original version uses a square grid. The hexagonal grid on this map is more reminiscent of old school war game boards. For this modified version, the revised movement rules are as follows:
| Mode of travel | Hexes moved |
|---|---|
| Over Land | 1 |
| Along Roads | 1, 2 or 3 |
| Down River | 1 or 2 |
| Up River | 1 |
PDF File
You can download a high-resolution PDF version of this map free for personal use. Right-click on the warrior_knights_iraq.pdf (1.6M) and “Save Target As…”. To use it, you’ll have to print out the four pages and tape them together.
If you actually own a copy of Games Workshop’s Warrior Knights (with all of its counters, cards, coins, knight markers, and other various chits), you can use this as an alternate game board. If you don not own a copy of Warrior Knights, you can use this board and make-up rules for your own game.
Hex-Grid Tool Kit
You can download and use the hex_grid_tool_kit.zip (322k) for personal and commercial use. This archive includes 50-, 100- and 200-pixel hexes for screen use as well as 16mm, 21mm, 30mm, 33mm, 1", 1.5" and 4" hexes for print-quality work.
In the course of making this map, I could not find any quality hex-grid resources on-line. There are some commercial fonts that provide this, but I couldn’t imagine buying a font for something as simple as geometrically-regular hexagon tile. I decided to render my own hex-grid resources and share them with anyone else that wants to use them.
