Hexes - equidistant spacing keeps the math simpler and the map more balanced.
Areas - greater variability in artwork and keeps players from over-tacticizing* the hexgrid.
or, heck, throw in...
Point-to-point - throw out the flyover country and get me straight to the key points on the map.
Sound off in the comments below!
By: Brant
* I'm pretty sure that's not a word, but this is a blog, not the New York Times, so I'm fine with it
It's kind of all the same to me. It depends on what I want to do with the game.
ReplyDeleteTopologically speaking, hexes are just smaller, polygon-shaped areas that occur at regular intervals, and the counters move from one hex to the next in a form of point-to-point movement anyway.
With strategic games I've done like Arriba Espana or Algeria, one turn represents a large and elastic amount of time in which indeterminate numbers of forces run around and do things, in the service of exercising a degree of control over a large area. So I use an irregular-area map (remembering that Joe Miranda once said to me that 20-25 was about the largest number of areas such a map should have).
With operational and tactical games like Freikorps and Summer Lightning, with shorter turns and more organized forces moving around with more defined military objectives and coherence, I use a hex map.
I've also done an urban tactical game (Civil Power) that used a "brick wall" staggered square system, which worked just like hexes but showed the rectangular buildings to better advantage, and games that dispensed with the map completely except as a field of non-adjacent cards (Green Beret, Red Guard), and one where the movement of counters did not matter at all, since the map was a diagram of social attitudes (Tupamaro).
Area. Real terrain does not conform to hexes as well as an area map will.
ReplyDeleteHexes allow for to much gamesmanship and achieveing the perfect 3-1 attack.
That is why I think the Simmons Games Napoleon stuff is awesome and projects a better period mood on the game session. (Not that I ever win or play smart).
Prefer hexes, but have found that in PC games -- the AI generally handles areas better than hexes.
ReplyDeletehexes make the math easier if youre an ORSA
ReplyDeletepoint to point / area is just a different way of drawing the same map
I like the way Avalanche did the areas in their Civil War games tho - you have to actually fit the counter in the area, facing where you want it, to move it there. does a good job of replicating the way formations moved back then. too bad the rest of the rules int hose games are shit