Hex strategy games boardgame
Tiles which make up a grid tend to tesselate in certain ways and also require “edges” to included on the tiles, that always cut down the number of options radically. It becomes much easier to imagine boards of different sizes and shapes.The board is much more resistant to knocks since the game pieces all sit on the middle of a board piece and not on the intersections between them.
Since each hexagon is a location it is much easier to produce a variety of tiles that can be mixed randomly into a game board: any tile can land next to any other tile in any orientation.This makes individual stones harder to kill, but surprisingly does not have huge effects on groups of stones. With players playing in the centers of the hexagons, each location on the board now has six liberties – one for each side of the hexagon – instead of four.See one of the early prototypes below using hexagons stolen from Memoir’44 for testing!Īt first, moving to hexagons as the unit of play might not seem much of a radical departure but it has several fairly important effects: So the Mitropia hex-board was born! After a significant amount of play-testing we’re pretty convinced that this will now be the final form for the game. Make the playing locations themselves from individual hexagons – rather than using hexagons to build a Grid… One which sacrificed one of the sacred cows of Go… In any case, while we could get decent combinations out of all these setups, the result remained fairly clunky.Īs we worked through other rule changes though, we started to realize there was another solution.
We also tried changing the play rules to have players play inside the squares rather than on the intersections. We tried different sizes and the smaller sizes were better (more variety) but … they were also more unstable since players would often have to play on the edges of individual hex tiles. The tiles did make a variety of board shapes, but the need to make a grid severely limits the possible relative sizes and alignments that work.
This did work but as soon as we got the new prototypes we realized that it was going to be tricky to make this as good as we really wanted. The tiles each had different patterns on them which lined up to make the grid. Our first attempt at doing this was using hexagonal board tiles to make a compose-able grid. Have special features (obstacles, hot spots and so on) at various locations to help players invent new strategies.Be compose-able / adaptable so that it could be varied on each play through,.We also knew though, that we wanted the board to have a few other features: