"Why hexes are awesome and why you should make your own" Topic

"Ross Kearns has launched a kick starter for a Tabletop Hex Terrain Toolkit. I asked Ross to write a guest article about it. All words and images are Ross's.

Whenever I see a wargames tables, no matter how pretty the terrain is, the first thing my eye is always drawn to is the ugly join between the boards. Then it's to the ugly join between the hills and the flat ground beneath them. To get around this with my own terrain, I assumed that I would have to make each battlefield on a great seamless board with undulating terrain. I wouldn't be able to transport it, of course, but at least I'd somehow be able to store it along with all the other boards for different scenarios, in racks in that brilliant warehouse I didn't own.

It was only later that I realised that the answer wasn't to have fewer joins, it was to have more. Here's a terrain board I made with modular hexes – covered in joins everywhere you look, and yet they don't seem to offend the eye at all. I think it's because unlike modular rectangular boards, there are no straight lines that cut right across the battlefield. Every join on this battlefield is only 5cm/2" long…"

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I'm not too good at making my own hexes, but I have cast a few made by others. People never seem to turn into frogs though.

Hexes are the reason that we use miniatures and rulers.

RST is utterly missing the point. It's NOT for hex-based games, it's modular terrain. If you study the KS, it's brilliant. Far more flexible than I believed was ever possible.

I find the "quilted" effect to be more disruptive than seams between square or rectangular modules. That is not to say that it looks bad, it is quite attractive, just that the method doesn't do for me, what it does for him.

I love hexes. I did my own 20 years ago about 8mm cork, no slopes and 100 mm AF. Problems were no slopes and very heavy. I now use commersial hex (Hexon 2). While I love the stuff for hills I hate hex features like Roads. They are too angular. Overlay straight roads and picture looks better. We have never got into the bespoke like the picture shows. Son and I have made a few hex styles not available but the ones shown here ar much more bespoke. They do look great but at the price of flexabillity of use. Its really a matter of taste,how much you trade between felexibily and better than avarage looks.

It also looks like these are thicker hex. Our hex is 8mm high so even at double thickness not ideal for more than 15mm figures. This looks more like 12mm hex so much better for bigure figures.

Whatever the size they all take up A LOT of space and take a lot of time to set up unless you have a detailed drawing identifing what type of hex to use. The more bespoke the hex the longer it takes to build. as you have to sort through lots of hex types to find the one you need.

That said for some games to me hex terrain is the solution.