Hex board

Hexes in plain words

Squares have a problem that hexes do not: the diagonal. On a square grid, the cell corner to corner is either one step, which makes diagonal movement faster than straight movement, or one and a half, which needs a rule everybody forgets. On a hex grid every neighbour is the same distance away, which is why wargames have used them for sixty years.

The cost is that hexes are laid out in offset rows, so the cell below and to the left is a neighbour on one row and two steps away on the next. Measuring by counting rows and columns gives the wrong answer about half the time. This board converts to the three-axis coordinates hex maths uses and measures properly, which is the whole reason the measure mode is worth having.

Prototyping a game in ten minutes

The fastest way to find out whether a game idea works is to play it badly, once, on something rough. Paint nine by nine, put four tokens down, invent a movement rule and try it. Nothing here needs cutting out or printing, the board survives a refresh, and the save slots mean the second attempt can start from the first.

The PNG is for when the rough version is good enough to show somebody. It draws the board and the tokens on white, on your own device, with nothing else in the file. Print it and you have a board for the table, which is usually the next step anyway.

Nothing leaves the device

The board you paint, the ten boards you save and the names on the tokens are all held in this browser. They are never uploaded, and a share link carries only the shape and the size, because a link that carried the board would be a link that carried the names on it.

Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses. For dice to move the tokens with, the dice pool rolls anything from a d4 to a d100, and for whose turn it is while the board is out, the turn order cards settle it in one deal.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.hex.boards and pph.hex.current, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.