Map Collector - Help
Starting a new game
When you first open the homepage or when you press the 
button in the toolbar, you will see a New Game window which allows you to choose which place you want to play in:
This window contains 3 parts:
- A world map with all the places that are available (you can zoom in and out with the wheel on your mouse)
- Details about the selected place
- A list to select if you want to play with time or money and if you want to play alone or a two-player game
To start a new game, click on a marker in (1). The colors represent how easy it is to win the game at that place: green for easy, yellow for medium and red for difficult. Some places have two different colors, this means several variants of the same place are available (for example with or without tram). If you hover over one of those places, you can choose which variant you want to play with.
If you have an account and you're logged in, you will see an "Open Saved Game" tab next to the New Game tab (4). If you click on that tab, you will see a list of your saved games. In order to open a saved game, you need to double click on it, single clicking will only select it.
The part with details about the selected place (2) contains the following details:
- Level: Can be Easy, Medium or Difficult. The fewer stations and lines there are, the easier the place is. When there are fewer stations and lines, it's usually easier to tell where it's best for you to go next. The level of each place is also visible in the place list (1).
- Number of stations: Indicates the number of stations in the selected place.
- Number of maps: Indicates the number of maps that you can collect in the selected place. Since there is one map per train line, this is also the number of train lines in this place.
- Length of a game month: Indicates how long a 30-day game month is. Since you have a game month to collect all maps, this number is approximately the amount of time you have to collect all maps. This number is only approximate since 31-day game months are slightly longer and the February game month is slightly shorter. The length of a game month is usually adapted to the difficulty of the place, so if there are a lot of maps that you need to collect, you usually have longer time to collect them.
- Salary: The amount of money you get each game month is shown here.
- Country: Indicates which country this place is in. This doesn't make any difference for the game, it's just a fun fact.
- Website in real life: This is a link to the official website of the company that operates the train lines in this place in real life. This link usually contains interesting real life information about the train lines in this place, for example a map of how it looks in reality (the map in Map Collector is adapted for the game). This link is not always in English. If it's in a language that you don't understand, you can use Google Translate to translate the page. Paste the link to the page in the box to the left and click on the link that shows up on the right. Some sites also have a language menu in the header so that you can get the site in English.
