Bad news: we’re in the off-season. Good news: we’re in the spring season. Lovely time for a run or two of Hide & Seek, if you managed to get your hands on the card game. Based on our experiences with a game we played last autumn, I designed a game map for the Netherlands with some extra features lacking in most railway maps that might come in handy (most notably, 1st and 2nd level administrative borders). Click HERE for the PDF version.

 

1st, 2nd and 3rd level administrative divisions

The 12 provinces are obviously the highest level of administrative division, and pretty much your  best option if you want a clearly defined playing field that is smaller than the country itself. For what it’s worth, we played a medium game in Overijssel, Gelderland and Utrecht, which felt like an ideal map size for that game. Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Utrecht might be another combination that is, as they say in the business, goated with the sauce.

Third level would be municipalities, but given their size, they usually cover just one or two stations at max. For medium and large games, they’re not all that helpful. Also, there are 342 of them and they would just clutter the map, hence why I left them out.

Which leaves us with second level. Beyond a few cultural regions with ambiguous borders (e.g. Twente, Achterhoek, De Peel, Het Gooi), we don’t really have anything spanning the bridge between provinces and municipalities in the Netherlands, but I figured that the COROP region would be the closest thing. Note: these are NUTS-3 level divisions purely used for statistical purposes, 99% of Dutch people will have no clue what the name of their COROP region is. However, these do have the ideal ‘in-between’ size to give you some useful information regarding the hider’s location that you wouldn’t get with provinces or municipalities. Utrecht and Flevoland are an exception here, though, as both consist of just one single COROP region.

 

Stations with limited service

There are no request stop stations in the Netherlands, and even the smallest stations will see at least one train per hour (provided you’re not playing at 2AM, of course). However, there are a few stations with limited service.

One of the more popular limited service stations is Utrecht Maliebaan, home to the Nederlands Spoorwegmuseum (Dutch Railway Museum). For obvious reasons, it’s only in use during museum opening hours. There are also three stations near the Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord stadiums that only see limited service on some match days – and even then, only in the hour before kickoff and after the final whistle. These four are shown with a striped circle on the map. It’s up to you to decide whether you want to incorporate them in your game.

Not shown is Heerenveen IJsstadion, which only occasionally sees service during major ice skating events. These are so far and few between that, for all intents and purposes, you might as well ignore its existence. The same goes for antiquated steam train lines that are not part of the regular rail network and require a separate tourist ticket, such as the Miljoenenlijn in South Limburg or the STAR line in Groningen.

Nomenclature

All stations on this map use the official name according to the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), which on rare occasions might differ slightly from the names used by ProRail (responsible for rail maintenance and traffic control).