Tabletop gamers have come up with three ways to measure distance in games that feature movement as a mechanic. There's the grid of 1-inch squares, there's the grid of hexagons, and there's the ruler or measuring tape. Over the past few decades, it's emerged that square grids are used for roleplaying games, hex grids are used for sci fi RPG and some wargames, and raw measuring tape or a ruler is used by wargames. But there's a lot of value to a hexagon, and given the choice I use a hex grid over squares or rulers. Here are the 6 reasons I like using hexagons no matter what game system I'm playing.
It happens every time I'm playing Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant. How do you move diagonally? I'm pretty sure you move one square but count two, but nobody every really seems to know, and for all I know it changes between Pathfinder and ToV.
The problem is, when you play on a square grid, your character can basically only turn in 90° increments. On a hex grid, though, your character can move in 60° increments, so you turn a little and step into the next hex. No problem. Assuming your character has 30 feet of movement and each hex represents 5 feet, then you can do this 6 times each turn (unless you also take a dash action, or whatever allowance the game makes for extra movement). You don't have to count every other move as a double move, you just move where you want to go until you run out of movement.
In a wargame, movement is usually expressed in inches or centimeters. I love this because it means you can set up miniatures on any flat surface and play. You don't need special maps or grid paper.
Except, I'm a lazy and impatient gamer. The truth is, among friends we don't bother measuring. We mean to. We have rulers, and for the first few squad advances we use them. And after that, we just eyeball everything.
Does that look like 5 inches to you? Yeah sure, close enough.
The reality is, I can't be bothered to measure movement in friendly wargames. For whatever reason, the act of measuring from base to destination, without knocking over terrain or other miniatures, is just too much work. I have soldiers to kill and objectives to secure.
A good hex battle mat, like my own ZoneMat™ or a good BattleTech map, solves this problem. Just count hexes, and you're done. Easy as that.
It's always been my impression that the tradition of using a square grid for fantasy roleplaying games arose from dungeon design being done on graph paper. I could be wrong, but certainly that's why I always used square maps for my games. I have my graph paper notebook, and I sketch dungeons into it, and so when I take players through the dungeon I use a large grid so I can transfer my sketch onto a big player map. You can't do that on a hex grid, right?
You can! Inside every hex, there's a hidden rectangle. (I've heard from some Game Masters that they have to turn the hex map a little to see it in an alignment that their brains can perceive without overthinking it.) Once you get yourself to see the square grid within the hexes, though, you can draw your dungeon walls and doorways and pit traps (why are you drawing those? your players are meant to discover them), and so on, exactly as you sketched out in your notebook.
When I was first switching over to a hex map, I spent way too much energy trying to force my hexes into 1-inch increments. Because as everybody knows, an inch is 5 feet in DnD games.
Except that it doesn't matter.
It's a game, and as long as everything on the game board is using the same scale, the playing field is level. Your monsters aren't at a disadvantage, and neither are the player characters. Everyone's moving forward or diagonally or sideways by the same hex.
Learning to embrace imprecision in your RPG or wargame is a key to keeping your game a game. When you worry about those sixteenth-of-an-inch corners on a hex, and what it means for a game when in fact that soldier only has 4-inches movement, then you might be a rules lawyer. That's not a bad thing, it means you know every last detail of your game system, and that's impressive. But if you're in it just to have fun, it can help to surrender to a little friendly imprecision.
In some games, turning matters. It might seem strange to a DnD player or even to a skirmish wargamer, but big vehicles or monsters often have to use up movement to change their current trajectory. You can do that on a square grid by just counting off an extra square or two of movement (depending on the rules) as you move the miniature. But with hexagons, you can often map every move a miniature makes to its movement allowance, whether that move is from one hex to another or just turning 60° or 120° or 180° to face a different direction.
Interestingly, many roleplaying games already use hex maps for some portion of the game (such as overland travel), or otherwise provide rules for both square and hex maps. With a hex map, you get one battle mat, and that's all you need. Whether you actually only buy one literal battle mat or not is another matter. Between my BattleTech maps and my ZoneMat™, I have 5, but I only need 1 during any single game.
Grid paper, both large and small, is pretty common. It's in notebooks for school, it's often incidentally on the back of gift wrapping paper to help you measure and cut, it's on dry-erase cards for roleplaying games. It's common enough to make it the easy choice for your game.
Hexagon grids are pretty specific to gaming, I think. They're not impossible to find, by any means. Depending on your location, you might have game stores on every street corner with hex maps, or you might have to get creative.
My buddy David Collins-Rivera found some adhesive dry-erase hex grids at a dollar store. They were meant as wallpaper, apparently, but he grabbed them up for a few bucks and repurposed them as a battle mat.
And Catalyst Games sells hex grids for BattleTech that I use for lots of different games.
And finally, I designed and have for sale online the ZoneMat™ neoprene battle mat in both desktop and mousepad sizes.
The image in this article is a sample from a copyright image by Catalyst Game Labs.