Your best bet is to figure out how close in your need to be, and then how big of a canvass you want to zoom out on. I do think that creating a mock-up in Illustrator is the way to go. That way you can layout your entire board, and even import a high res image of one into Illustrator. Once you are happy with the layout, import the whole thing into your project and use your 3D position and rotation keys to simulate camera motion.