WoRSketch, the map planner

A board is one plan. It carries a stack of slides, and each slide is a sheet over one map, or a blank sheet over nothing. That is what lets a single board brief a whole engagement: the approach on one slide, what to do if the bridge is held on the next, the order of march on a blank one at the end.

Everything you draw saves itself as you go. There is no save button and nothing to lose by closing the tab.

1. Start from a map

   Open any map and press Plan this map. With nothing drawn yet it makes your board for that map; after that it lists the plans you already have for it and offers a new one. Asking for a new one while an empty plan for that map is still waiting opens the empty one instead, so the button is a way back to your work rather than a way to collect blank boards.

2. Or start from the hub

   WoRSketch lists everything you can reach: your own boards, your unit's, ones shared with you, and what the rest of the site has published. Start a new one on any map, or on a blank sheet. If you help run a unit, the same form asks whose plan it is, so a board can be made for the unit from the start rather than made as your own and handed over afterwards. Pick a map you already have an empty plan for and it asks whether to open that one or start another.

3. You do not need an account

   A board drawn signed out belongs to your browser and works exactly like any other, room and all. It is thrown away after a day: the banner across the top says how long it has left and offers to keep it, and signing in turns it into yours permanently with everything already on it.

Keeping your boards in order

The hub files your plans as well as listing them. Make folders above your own plans and move plans into them; deleting a folder only unfiles what was in it. The line above the plans narrows them by map, campaign, whether anything has been drawn yet, and who can open them, and sorts them by when you last worked on them, by age, by title, or by map.

Select picks several plans at once, to move into a folder, change who can open them, or delete together. A deleted plan is not gone: it waits under Deleted, where putting it back returns it exactly as it was, and only what is left there for a year is removed on its own.

The toolbar runs across the top, clustered by what you are doing, and the space beside it holds exactly the controls that apply to whatever you have armed or selected. Every tool has a letter, and the letter is faster than the button once you know it. Hold Shift while drawing to lock a line to a bearing or a box to a square, and press Esc to abandon whatever you have half-drawn.

A plan is about particular units, so the marker tool places particular units. Choosing one from the palette arms the tool; clicking the map puts it down. Choosing one while counters are selected re-points those counters at it instead, the same way choosing a color recolors a selection.

• Plain counters

  Anything not on the order of battle: a detachment, a hypothetical, a guess at where the enemy will be. Pick a side and a branch and place it. Real units add to this rather than replacing it.

• Your own markers

  The marker library holds art you have uploaded and presets you have saved, yours or your unit's, so a symbol your unit always uses is two clicks away on every board rather than redrawn each time.

• The map's order of battle

  The units that actually deploy on the slide's map, grouped by side, straight from the site's own game data. A placed counter draws its short designator, so “126th New York” reads as 126th NY and “Battery Clark” as Clark, because the branch glyph has already said battery. A pool slot places too, and keeps reading as the pool rather than pretending its occupant is known.

A counter names what it fields on a small tag under it, the same for infantry, cavalry and artillery. Folded, the tag is one line: the weapon itself when there is only one, and otherwise how many, such as 2 WEAPONS or, for a battery, 6 GUNS. Select the counter and the tag opens to a line per weapon with the number of each, down to three before the rest become a count; Full loadouts under Display opens every tag on the board at once. Name its weapon is on as you place, and turning it off leaves a counter wearing only its designator.

The model year is part of the name and stays: Springfield M1842, M1855 and M1861 are a smoothbore firing buck and ball and two rifles, and a counter that said only “Springfield” would draw all three regiments alike. Counters can also name themselves as you place them, and be renamed later with F2 or a double-click. A counter keeps the words it was drawn with even if the unit is later renamed: a plan is a record of what somebody intended on the day, not a live view of the catalog.

Pools, and who is holding one

Some slots on a map are pools: the map fields the slot and which unit fills it is drawn at match time. A pool counter keeps the pool's name, because that is what the map actually says. What it cannot say on its own is what that position carries, since a regiment brings its own weapons and the possible occupants bring different ones.

So the properties panel offers them. Under Pool unit, pick which of the slot's possible units is holding the ground, and the counter wears that unit's designator and draws the weapons and ranges it brings, with the slot it came from still named above it. Leave it undecided and the counter stays the pool it is. An artillery battery is issued its guns per map and owns them outright, so it has nothing to narrow and is not asked.

Who is fielding it

A counter says which in-game unit holds a position. The other half of a real plan is which community is spawning as it, and the properties panel asks that directly: pick the units from the site's own directory under Fielded by, and their Discord crests are drawn beside the counter's weapon tag, or under the counter when it names no weapon. A position often belongs to several units together, so up to five crests sit on one counter rather than the plan naming one and making the rest invisible. You can also say how many players each expects to bring.

Like everything else on a plan, this is recorded rather than looked up: the crest and the name are kept as they were on the day, so a board still reads correctly after a unit renames itself, changes its crest, or disbands.

The game paints its own marks onto every map: where each side spawns, a plate naming every battery, and the points each round is fought over. WoRSketch plans on a clean copy of each sheet with that lettering painted out and the ground beneath it filled back in, and puts the marks back as markers you place. Drawn rather than painted, they read at any zoom, say what the paint never could, and can be hidden or deleted; until they are placed, the map shows bare. The copy is exactly the size of the sheet it came from, so a map's calibration and every board already drawn on it line up as they always did.

• Spawn bases

  Each side's flag over a BASE USA or BASE CSA plate, where that side comes in. A sheet that shows only one side's base draws only that one.

• Batteries

  A plate at every emplacement, with a chip saying whose it is, blue for USA and tan for CSA, and its guns on a tag underneath, folded and unfolded like a counter's. A battery that already has a counter on the slide is left out, so its guns are never listed twice.

• Points of contention

  A ring around the ground being fought over, its dashed edge turning slowly so it never passes for part of the map. A conquest map letters its points A, B and C and an Onslaught numbers them in order. On those maps only the lettered points are drawn; the flags the game paints for other sectors are painted out and left off.

Putting them on the board

Open a slide on a map with none of its markers on it and WoRSketch offers to place map markers: one tick for every mark and every regiment, grouped into the bases, infantry at the bases, the batteries and the points, all of them ticked. The regiments go down beside their base as ordinary counters, fanned out and ready to move. With Union and CSA layers on the slide, each side's marks go on its own layer and the points go on Notes; switch that off, or have no such layers, and the run lands on a layer of its own that one delete takes back. Once it lands, the board zooms to what it put down.

A placed marker stands where the game paints it. You can name it, fade it, arrange it and delete it, but not move, copy or pin it, because a base that has wandered off, or a second one, makes the plan wrong. Drag a selection with a marker in it and everything else moves while the marker stays put. A marker you delete stays deleted, and deleting them all leaves the map bare. The next time the board is opened with none on the slide, the offer comes back. Not now puts it off until then, Do not offer again on this board stops it asking there for good, and Place map markers in the This board menu brings it back whenever anything is left to place.

The ruler measures ground in yards along as many segments as you need, and the guns tool draws what a battery covers. Both report real distances, which means both need the map's real scale: a site admin calibrates a map once by marking two points a known distance apart, and every board on it reads true from then on, including boards already drawn.

Gun ranges are drawn honestly, which surprises people the first time. A battery gets one ring per distinct range it fields, not one at its longest: a battery of three Parrotts reaching 5000 yards and three Napoleons reaching 1300 draws both, because a single outer ring would claim six guns reach 5000 when half reach a quarter of that. Identical ranges collapse into one ring.

The maps are the playable ground, a few hundred meters across, while the guns reach thousands of yards. So most true rings are larger than the whole map, and rather than draw a circle nobody can scroll to, the counter states the coverage in words and draws stepped reference rings you can actually judge distance against. Rings are off until you ask for them, per counter, and only artillery gets them.

The filmstrip along the bottom is the deck. Every tile shows what is actually drawn on that slide and who is standing on it, so you can see what is happening on slide three without leaving slide one. Add a slide on the same map, on another map, or blank, and double-click one to rename it. Deleting one takes what is drawn on it, so it asks first.

The copy button on a tile, or Ctrl + Shift + D, duplicates a slide whole: the same map, the same picture of it, the same calibration, and every layer and mark already drawn. That is how a plan gets its next step. Draw the approach, copy the slide, and move the counters to where they end up, so the deck reads as one action after another on the same ground instead of as two drawings that have to be compared.

Each slide has its own layers, listed down the right. Draw the friendly plan on one, what you expect the enemy to do on another, and turn the second off when you brief. Hiding a layer takes it off the board for everyone in the room, because that is a decision about the briefing rather than a private view setting; locking one leaves it visible but stops it being picked up by accident. New work lands on whichever layer is selected, and each row says how much is already on it.

Beside them, the properties panel holds everything about what is selected: its placement, its colors, its size, and who fields it. Pinning is the same idea as a locked layer applied to one object: Ctrl + Shift + L pins a counter so dragging past it moves the map instead of moving it. Anything pinned, on a locked layer, or placed from the map stays where it is when a selection around it is dragged, nudged or lined up, and wears a dotted frame instead of the dashed one to say so.

How it scales is the one setting worth understanding before you place much. Counters, markers and notes start on Auto (1:1): they shrink with the map while you look at the whole field, and once you zoom in past 1:1 they hold their size on the screen, so magnifying to place something precisely never buries the ground under the marks being placed. A mark set to scale with map sits on the ground instead, keeping the patch of map it covers and growing and shrinking with it, the way the map's own painted lettering does. A mark set to hold its size sits on the screen: it stays the same size at every zoom, in or out, so it still reads on a board zoomed right out. Line work has no setting. It grows a little as you zoom in, so a magnified route still reads as a drawn line without burying the ground.

Both of those are sized from the zoom you choose them at, where the mark looks exactly as it would on Auto, so moving a mark off Auto never makes it jump. If one ends up reading too large or too small, Resize to this zoom re-sizes it from wherever you are standing now. That is also the way to correct a counter for a real unit, which has no size handle of its own. Go to it, in the properties panel and on the right-click menu, brings any single mark into the middle of the board, and for one set to scale with the map returns to the zoom it was set at.

Anyone who can reach a board can be in it at the same time. You see each other's cursors, each other's strokes as they are drawn rather than after they land, and who is reading which slide. Signed-in people appear by name and avatar; everybody else appears under a guest name.

• Point at things

  Alt-click drops a ping everyone in the room sees, from whatever tool you are holding. It works on a board you can only read, which is the point: you can join a briefing and still say “there”.

• Present

  Presenting drives everyone else's slide and view, so the room is looking at what you are looking at. Anyone can break off to check a flank on their own and press Rejoin to snap back.

• Hold the floor

  The host can lock the board while they talk, which suspends everyone's drawing without throwing anybody out, and can remove somebody from the room outright.

• Say something

  The board has its own chat, folded into a button in the corner that counts what you have not read. It belongs to the session rather than to the board: it is for the people looking at the plan right now, and it is not kept once everybody leaves. Anything worth keeping goes on the board.

Reaching a board and drawing on it are two separate questions, asked separately in Board settings. The audience decides who gets in and whether they arrive holding a pen; the tiers depend on who owns the board.

On top of the audience you can name individual people and say what each may do, and put out a link that lets in whoever holds it, reading or drawing as you choose, with a password if you want one. Somebody with no account can open a link and draw. The layers only ever add, so the most open route a person has is the one they get, and nothing here can take away what another layer gave.

On a unit's board, rank covers all of this: anyone whose rank can manage battle plans manages every board the unit holds. That belongs to the unit rather than to one board, so it is stated in the settings dialog and set on the Ranks page.

• Export a picture

  Download or copy the open slide as a PNG. Frame it as what you are looking at, the whole map, or tight around the drawing, at up to three times its own size, and see the picture itself before you take it.

• The board's own picture

  A board earns a thumbnail from what is drawn on it the first time somebody draws and it saves. Until then its card and its Discord post show the map art.

• Post it to Discord

  Send the plan into one of your unit's channels, framed the same way as an export. The picture goes as an attachment, full width, with a button under it that opens the board whatever its audience is. Choose whether that button lets the channel read the plan or draw on it; reading is the default, because the link is as open as the channel it lands in.

  No unit, or a server the bot is not in? Paste a webhook instead and the post goes to that channel directly. It is used once to send and never stored.

• Copy somebody else's

  Any board you can open can be copied into a new one of your own on the same map, which is how you build on a published plan without touching it.

• Hand it to your unit

  A personal board can be given to a unit and becomes one of its battle plans: the unit owns it, staff can correct it, and it stays if you leave. You are left on it as an editor. It asks first, because it is a real change of owner.

• Submit it to an operation

  A unit fielding in an operation can put a board forward as its plan for one of the rounds. What the operation receives is a copy, on purpose: keep working on your own board afterwards and the submitted plan does not move, and nothing done to the operation's copy reaches back to yours. Submit again to replace it. A round can be planned or not as you please, and a unit that submits nothing still holds its place in the order of battle.

• Report a published board

  Anyone can open a plan somebody published to the whole site, so anyone who opens one can flag it for a moderator.

The keys worth learning first. The editor keeps the complete list behind the ? key, generated from the bindings it is actually running, so that one is never out of date.

Every shortcut and gesture, generated from the live bindings

?

Abandon an unfinished shape, close a rename, put down what is held

Esc

Undo; Ctrl + Shift + Z redoes

Ctrl + Z

Delete the selection

Delete

Duplicate the selection

Ctrl + D

Copy, and paste onto this slide or another one

Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V

Nudge the selection; Shift moves ten times as far

Arrow keys

Name the selected marker

F2

Pin the selection so it stops being dragged by accident

Ctrl + Shift + L

Bold or italicize every selected note at once

Ctrl + B / Ctrl + I

Duplicate this slide, map and all

Ctrl + Shift + D

Frame the whole map; + and - zoom

0

In the bottom corner of the board, Fit shows the whole map and Plan zooms to everything drawn on the slide, with a margin around it. Display sets how the map is drawn on your screen, its brightness, contrast and color, and which of its own marks you see.

And what the mouse, the touchscreen, and the stylus do:

Pan

Middle-drag, right-drag, Space + drag, or the Pan tool

Zoom

Mouse wheel, or the on-canvas buttons

Touch

Drag to move the map, pinch to zoom; with a drawing tool, one finger draws

Select

Click an object; Shift-click to select several; drag empty space to box-select

Straighten

Hold Shift while drawing to lock a line to a bearing, or a box to a square

Stylus

Pressure varies the stroke width; the eraser end is not used

Name a marker

Double-click it, or turn on naming as you place

Write a note

Click to drop one, or drag across to set the column its lines break at. Type in place or in the properties rail; Enter starts a new line and clicking away finishes

Reshape a note

Drag a side to set the column, the foot to set the frame; the words re-wrap as you drag. Glyph size is the Size field, never a handle

Resize a mark

Drag a corner. A mark set to scale with the map or to hold its size is sized from the zoom that was chosen at, and Resize to this zoom re-sizes it from where you are now

Ping

Alt-click drops a marker everyone in the room sees

Right-click

On a mark, while you can draw: rename, duplicate, copy, bring forward or send back, pin, properties, delete. On empty board: paste and select all. A right-drag pans instead, so the menu opens only when the map did not move. Copying the board, exporting, posting to Discord and reporting are in the board's own menu in the header

Map display

The Map button dims or sharpens the base map; it only affects your screen

Slides

Double-click a slide to rename it; the copy button on a slide duplicates it whole, with its map, its scale and everything drawn on it

Following

Move the map yourself to explore; Rejoin snaps back to the presenter

Ruler and guns

Measured in yards on a calibrated map; disabled until an admin calibrates it

The things that stop people, most of them the result of a deliberate decision rather than a fault, which is exactly why they need saying out loud.

• I can open a board but I cannot draw on it.

  Reaching a board and drawing on it are two separate settings, so being let in does not by itself hand you a pen. Whoever owns it sets what its audience may do, read or draw, and can name you on top of that from Board settings. Two other things stop a pen that should work: a host can lock a board while they talk, which suspends everyone's editing until they unlock it, and a board you reached through a link is held to whatever that link grants. Ping still works throughout, so you can point at what you mean.

• I opened my board to everyone and now nobody can draw on it.

  Publishing drops the audience back to reading unless the same change asks for drawing as well. The people a board reached when it was shared with your unit are not the people it reaches once it is open to the whole site, so letting everybody draw is something to choose rather than something to inherit. Set it to draw again in Board settings if that is genuinely what you want, and note what the warning there says: anyone can then change it, with or without an account.

• I drew a plan without an account. Will it still be there tomorrow?

  Not unless you keep it. A board drawn without an account belongs to your browser and is thrown away after a day, which is what lets anyone start drawing without signing up first. The banner across the top says how long it has left and offers to keep it: sign in and it becomes yours permanently, with everything already on it. Clearing your cookies loses it sooner, since the browser is the only thing holding the claim.

• The ruler and the gun ranges are grayed out on my map.

  Those tools need the map's real-world scale, and a map nobody has calibrated has none, so they are hidden rather than shown lying. A site admin calibrates a map once by marking two points a known distance apart, and every board drawn on it reads true distances from then on, including boards already drawn. A blank slide has no scale either, and never will: there is no ground behind it to measure. Report the map from the contact page and it can be calibrated.

• I turned on gun ranges and my battery drew nothing.

  Almost certainly because the ring is bigger than the map. A playable map is a few hundred meters across while a gun reaches one to five thousand yards, so at true scale most rings enclose the whole thing. Rather than draw a circle nobody can scroll to, the counter says the range covers the map in words and draws stepped reference rings you can actually judge distance against. Two other reasons it draws nothing: only artillery gets rings, since a ring around a revolver is noise, and an uncalibrated map has no scale at all.

• My counter shows no weapons under it.

  Check Name its weapon first: it is on as you place, but a counter can have it turned off. If it is on and nothing shows, it is almost certainly a pool slot. A pool is a position the map fields without deciding who fills it, and a regiment carries its own weapons, so the slot has nothing of its own to list: what lands there depends on which unit turns up. Pick one under Pool unit in the properties panel and the counter wears that unit's name and draws what it brings, with the pool still named above it. Leave it undecided and the counter stays the pool, which is the honest answer until somebody knows. An artillery battery is issued its guns per map and is never affected.

• My counter only says 2 WEAPONS.

  That is its loadout folded to one line, which keeps a board full of counters readable. Select the counter and the tag opens to every weapon it fields, or turn on Full loadouts under Display to open every tag on the board at once. A counter fielding a single weapon names it even when folded, and a battery counts its guns rather than its kinds of gun.

• Where did the battery names and base flags on the map go?

  WoRSketch plans on a clean copy of each map sheet with the game's painted lettering taken out, and puts those marks back as markers you place: each side's base, a plate for every battery, and the points of contention. Placed, they stay readable at any zoom, say whose each battery is and what it fields, and can be hidden under Display or deleted. Until they are placed the map shows bare, and WoRSketch offers to place them whenever a slide is opened without them. The copy is exactly the size of the sheet, so a map's calibration and the boards already drawn on it are unaffected.

• I deleted one of the map's markers and it did not come back.

  On purpose: a marker you delete stays deleted, and the map shows bare where it stood. To put one back, choose Place map markers from the This board menu, which offers whatever the slide no longer has. Delete them all and WoRSketch offers to place them again the next time the board is opened. A marker cannot be moved or copied either: it stands where the game paints it, once. Drag a selection with a marker in it and everything else moves while the marker stays behind.

• WoRSketch keeps offering to place the map's markers.

  It offers once each time you open a slide with none of the map's markers on it, because without them the map shows bare. Place them, or tick Do not offer again on this board before closing the offer and it stops asking there. Not now only puts it off until the next time the board is opened.

• A unit was renamed and my board still shows the old name.

  On purpose. A plan is a record of what somebody intended on the day, so a counter keeps the words it was drawn with instead of quietly restating itself as the catalog changes underneath it. It also means a board draws itself with no lookup, in an export, in a Discord post, and years later. Rename the counter yourself if the new name matters more than the record.

• Who can open a board I have made?

  Whoever you say. A board belongs to you, to your unit, or to your browser, and Board settings decides who reaches it: invite only, your followers, or everyone for a personal board; staff, the unit, or everyone for a unit's. On top of that you can name individual people, and put out a link that lets in whoever holds it, with a password if you want one. The layers only ever add, so the most open route somebody has is the one they get. Boards shared with a unit show on its profile.

• The board I posted to Discord shows the map instead of my plan.

  A board earns its picture the first time somebody draws on it and saves, so a board posted before that has nothing but the map art to show. Draw, let it save, then post again. If the post is up to date but the plan looks wrong, check the framing you chose: a picture can be what you were looking at, the whole map, or tight around the drawing, and the three look very different on a board that is zoomed in.

• I pressed Present and nothing happened.

  Presenting drives everybody else's slide and view, so on your own screen there is nothing to see. The bar says who it is reaching. Anyone following you can break off to look around on their own and press Rejoin to snap back, which is deliberate: somebody checking a flank should not have to interrupt the briefing to do it.

• I drew a plan on my own account. Can my unit have it?

  Hand it over from Board settings and it becomes one of the unit's battle plans: the unit owns it, its staff can correct it, and it stays with the unit if you ever leave. You are left on it as an editor, and a setting with no meaning under a unit is mapped across, so shared with your followers becomes shared with the unit. It is a real change of owner rather than a link, which is why it asks first. Copy the board beforehand if you want to keep your own version.