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11 October 2011

Sound Off! Hexes or Areas?

Which makes for a better wargame map?

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

4 comments:

  1. It's kind of all the same to me. It depends on what I want to do with the game.

    Topologically 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).

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  2. Area. Real terrain does not conform to hexes as well as an area map will.

    Hexes 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).

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  3. Prefer hexes, but have found that in PC games -- the AI generally handles areas better than hexes.

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  4. hexes make the math easier if youre an ORSA

    point 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

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