This is a Niigata Prefecture territory collecting map inspired by UonumaRobert's "Battle for Japan" and NeonNeptune's "Battle for Gunma" and is played essentially the same way. I didn't include any of the special cards like they do, just a map of all the cities set to work the same way.
This is my first time making anything CLOSE to this complicated in PowerPoint, so some things might not be quite right, but so far it is working well for me. Please let me know if you run into any problems!
UPDATE:
Thanks to the suggestions of my lovely fellow Niigata living people, I have improved the map so it is no longer precarious to select cities. Just click on the name and they will change color. Thank you for all the feedback!
How to Play:
- Decide what questions you want to use and how you want students to answer (for example, print a sheet of questions and read them out, students raise their hands to answer)
- Explain that the students can get a city for their team by answering a question, but the city must touch a city they already have (doesn't apply for first city of course). Niigata has two lovely islands, Sado and Awashima, so those don't touch anything but play as if they are connected to Niigata City and Murakami respectively.
- Explain that if a team wants a city from another team, they must janken or roll dice for it. My students love the drama of jankening for territory but you can use dice too (1-3 don't get city, 4-6 get city).
- Divide the class into 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, or 12 teams. There are three colors so try to get an equalish amount of kids in each. The teams are Toki, Albirex, and Lerch.
- When ready to play, change to the map slide.
- When students answer a question, let them pick a city. Use something with a keyboard and track pad or mouse to cycle through to the correct color (including white for if you hit the wrong city). Click on the name of the city to change the color. Since I accidentally go to the next slide sometimes, I included a "whoops!" slide after the map. You can just click the up arrow to return and all the colors should be correct.
- When a winner is selected, go to the winner slide by clicking on their mascot. If you click again they should do a spin.
Thank you so much to UonumaRobert and NeonNeptune for both inspiring me to take this on and providing enough instructions in your games for me to replicate it!
Hi, great looking map. A couple of suggestions though. On the battle slide you've got click anywhere to go to the next slide active. This means its very easy to accidentally move to the next slide. In powerpoint in the 画面切り替え menu on the far right there is a checked box called クリック時. Unclick that box. That way the only way to move to the next slide is with the enter key or clicking on a hyperlink.
Also the town names make it a bit hard to click on the towns since the names are sitting on top of the boxes. One quick fix would be to make the town squares maybe 40% transparent, move the town names under the squares instead of above them. They'll still be visible (although a little gray) through the boxes. Then create a solid white copy of the map and put it below the whole thing as a base. I've put an example here.
https://www.altopedia.net/activities/866-how-to-make-a-powerpoint-point-game
You can see what you think of the look. There are other work arounds but they would take a lot more time. I like easy fixes.
I like that you included Kawaguchi as part of Nagaoka. I had forgotten about that when I was working on my own battle map.
@UonumaRobert Oh that’s a setting? I'll go fix it! I did notice that I go to the wrong place a lot, hence the "whoops" slide. This was made in one day of caffeine fueled deskwarming time so definitely needs some work. Thank you so much for the feedback! Big fan of your work.
Thanks for sharing this too. I've been thinking about doing a Niigata Map ever since the Gunma one was posted. Now I've a few to pick from.
@UonumaRobert I have it set up so you click on the shape itself to change the color. Should it be the name instead? So, ideally I should have (invisible?) squares above the town names so when click on the name the color changes?
I used this map (https://mapfan.com/pref/15) to copy from, so I just copied whatever it had. The benefit of this map is if I didn't know the name of the town, I could just click on the kanji and it would take me to a map where I could copy and look up the name.
Yaaahooooo! We need more and more activities about our lovely Niigata XD Thank you, this is great. I love that instead of color, they choose a yurachara. I'm also learning how to PPT too. Much to learn but super fun once you get how things work.
https://www.altopedia.net/activities/2875-battle-for-the-states-u-s-a
I made one of Niigata, too. I posted it here if you'd like to check it out.
Was it as time-consuming making the city outlines? It took me quite a bit.
Niigata represent! Yeah! One other suggestion to make the boxes easier to click is to select the area then type it in. So, click on Niigata city then type "Niigata city" That will insert the text and make the text also clickable (but you have to delete the existing text boxes too). You may need to edit the angle and size of the text to make it fit, but enough of the students should know the names of the areas anyway, right? Right!?
@Matsue2012 Yay for Niigata friends! Originally I was just looking for characters to put in the background but our lovely Lerch was so funny I had to give him his own team and find some other mascots.
Your battle for Niigata looks great! How did you get the cities to be so easily clickable?
Outlining the cities was time consuming, but I enjoyed it XD. Now I want to make maps for more prefectures with my copious deskwarming time.
@jiggswalsh So many Niigata friends! Happy to put some more Niigata representation out there.
Thanks for the tip to make the cities more clickable! I'll give that a try today. I'm not sure how many of the cities my students know, but guess there's only one way to find out!
When I was in the planning stage of making one of these maps I was thinking about putting in the city names in kanji since kanji would fit the spaces better and then just have an English cheat sheet print for myself to look at.