The impact a map can have on a game is often overlooked. A good strategy incorporates a tactically-sound map choice. But when it comes to locale, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. We're here to help you make smart decisions when it comes to Heroclix real estate.

Official Title: Madripoor Lowtown
Commonly Known As: Madripoor, The Princess Bar
Map on Reverse: Krakoa
Dimensions: 24" x 36" (16x24 squares)
Set: Giant-Size X-Men
Status: Active

Official Title: Madripoor Lowtown
Commonly Known As: Madripoor, The Princess Bar
Map on Reverse: Krakoa
Dimensions: 24" x 36" (16x24 squares)
Set: Giant-Size X-Men
Status: Active
Availability: Madripoor Lowtown was distributed with Giant-Size X-Men's prize support kit, and as a recent set may still be available at your local tournament scene.

As Gen Con Worlds continues to approach, we take a look at another map legal for the event as we try to get you prepared, geographically-speaking, for the big event.

Madripoor is a slum of rundown buildings where lowlifes deal dirty business and violence is never more than one wrong step from breaking out. If you're fresh off the boat, you may not last long in this harbor town. Wizkids captured that in this map, where the most obvious path is the most treaturous and conflict is unavoidable.

The conflict starts at the very beginning, where rolls for starting areas determine who will have the advantage of freedom of movement. The player coming down off the junk ship has only two narrow planks of clear terrain, which can be easily congested if your opponent places objects in these pathways. If you find yourself with no choice but to jump overboard, use the buildings for cover while you pull yourself onto the dock.


Let's talk about the buildings for a moment. On most maps, a building means a rooftop and Elevated terrain for snipers. Whether it's meant to represent a structurally unsafe building or simply a way of pushing combat toward hand-to-hand engagements, four of Madripoor's five buildings are Blocking terrain, with the fifth losing much of its line of sight to the blocking buildings surrounding it. This makes Madripoor an unusual outdoor map in that it has the close quarters that melee combatants usually go indoors for.

The other effect of this is that the map has a fair number of squares that simply cannot be occupied. Maneuvering will be abnormally difficult here for those figures not cut out for mobility, and stationary ranged figures are much more likely to be able to set up once and reasonably predict where their targets will be. Here, move and attack is much less important than range of attack and resilient lines of fire (think giants or sharpshooters).


There are two alternate pathways on this map, and you'll likely struggle to utilize either of them. The P column can be used to avoid the central conflict, and can be an excellent position to launch first strikes from. Your larger targets (eg. giants) may be able to get quite a ways toward the opponent before a shot can be fired on them.

On the other side, the A column is home to a long, narrow alleyway with no way to escape. That means if you enter in one end, you'll be stuck facing whatever you find at the other. This is, of course, unless your figure can walk over the Blocking terrain that makes up the Princess Bar. This can be an excellent place to retreat to, especially if you plan ahead and put objects on either side, making it impossible to reach you there in one grounded action.


Who should set sail for Madripoor?

-Flight and Giants. I say this because, of all the terrain-avoiding figures, these ones are most likely to also have move and attack. Unlike many maps, Madripoor's terrain is largely out of play, meaning you're not working around it but rather working to include it. A giant can move about here abnormally safely, and your opponent will have to reposition to places without advantage to cope with that.

-Swarm teams especially those that have a centerpiece, can be difficult to deal with here. It's not just the breakaway, but also the escape route afterwards, that proves difficult.

-Energy Explosion and Quake. Characters here can't help but pack together. When that happens, crowd attacks can be devastating. Pulse Wave, however, isn't advised, as it'll be difficult to keep your teammates out of the radius.

-Barrier in such a confined street will frustrate the opposition to no end.

-Sharpshooter ensures you can hit who you want to, despite the restricted combat space.

-Stealth. It takes planning, but with such narrow lines of fire here, you can predict where an object will get in the way of a shot and move your Stealthed figures behind it freely. This is a map where you can enjoy freedom of positioning rarely available to Stealthed figures.

Oh, and Juggernaut. Charge through the Princess Bar and put a smile on your face.

I guarantee Madripoor isn't rating high on places to move to, but what about places to battle?

Theme: 5/5
The tone, the references, and the thematic graphic design makes this a perfect replication of Madripoor's most significant elements in one small map. I even love how the player arriving in Madripoor is at a disadvantage against the local riff raff.
Clarity: 3/5
There's something to be said for expectations. Players new to this map may assume they can sit atop the roofs. Also, the extremely prevalent Blocking terrain has a border color that's unfortunately similar to the color scheme of this map.
Tactical Impact: 4/5
This map's impact is significant, largely in how it makes starting areas matter. On top of that, the large amounts of Blocking terrain are unimportant until they suddenly become extremely important (such as when they're being used to keep a flying Hypersonic Speedster safe).
Balance: 2/5
It is exceedingly difficult to start on the boat, at least for the first few turns. It's also hard to deal with a swarm here, especially if it's accompanied by a large leader you need to deal with first.
Terrain Diversity: 4/5
The map has Hindering, Water, Blocking, and Elevated. However, the balance is skewed heavily toward Blocking, which are in most cases just dead squares. That's a point against the map.

Overall: 3.8/5
A perfectly respectable score for this map, but with a word of caution: do not choose this map unless you KNOW you can use it to your advantage.

That's it for this week! Until next time, enjoy the scenery!

Headed to Worlds this year? Check out the Worlds Map Primer!

Looking like this got lost in the cluster of news lately, but good review as usual!

Definitely a Juggernaut-made map.

There's a trick to launching it at the top of the stream, and I forgot to do it; thus it went date stamped, as in, the date I began working on the article. Ah well; 81 views is still something!

Played on this frequently when it showed up and then again just this last weekend. Knowing how to use that one rooftop can be critical to things going right or wrong.

Very good review!

I'm still trying to figure out why those buildings are blocking?

I would guess that it's to create the right feel for Madripoor. The dark, narrow alleyways where brawls break out. Rooftop snipers would interfere with that, and on this map the roofs, if elevated terrain, would be VERY popular.

I wish another building's top could have been elevated. Having one area of elevated, a small area as well, leads to many troubles for me. I run up on there and usually get knocked off sometime later in the game from close-combat pieces rolling doubles. Even 2 damage with 2 knock back can ruin a figure after it takes 2 more damage from falling off.

All the blocking really doesn't help the map. It just makes the middle area the only place battle goes down. I've run a HSS guy around the corner of a building once but battles rarely ever carry out into the alleys.

This map would probably be a lot more interesting if you put two side by side...

I know its a DC storyline, but this would be a great map to run the big martial artist battle from Birds of Prey a few years back. A group of villainous martial artists were accompanying a large drugs shipment to arrive in Gotham's docks and Black Canary assembled a top team of hand to hand fighters to stop them, including Huntress, Green Arrow (Connor), Richard Dragon, Wildcat, Creote and Savant. Just a shame we don't have half of that team yet.

Pretty map but game play has lots of issues, I don't see myself choosing this map...ever.

good review

Since it's release, I've really liked this map. Great review.