One way to measure a connected graph is the clustering coefficient. So I think if consistency of distance is important in your game, you might prefer hex tiles. If you consider the circumference as travel distance without diagonal movement it would take twice as many moves, and then the ratio is even further off. So 6X comes a lot closer to the non-tiled version than does 4X.Īnd if you look at the shape of those two, the one based on square tiles makes a diamond shape. If you were looking for the circumference of a circle, the formula is 2PI*X. If you find a formula for the number of tiles X tiles away from a centre-point, (doubling back is not permitted) it does work out to 6X for hexagons and 4X for squares. And for hexagonal tile-based movement, you get a hexagon. But for square tile-based movement, you’ll get a diamond shape. If you think about distances as the non-tiled distance, a circle contains all points that are equal distance from the centre of that circle. If you don’t allow diagonal movement, that takes two steps and you’re traveling 30% slower than you might expect. If you allow diagonal movement, you can travel 40% faster than you would intuitively expect. But if you instead just count the number of tiles it takes to traverse the distance, you end up with a different ratio. The length of the diagonal of a 1×1 square is the square root of 2, or about 1.4. One thing that’s odd with squares is the difference between diagonal distance and cardinal distance. With a hex grid, you have to work a little harder to find different movement patterns. Diagonals are a natural idea for squares but not for hexes.įor purposes of orthogonal unit differentiation, it’s simple to have pieces that move diagonally, cardinally, or both.

In hex chess variants, sometimes they come up with something for the bishops to do, but it feels kind of forced, to me. In a hex grid, you haven’t got that ambiguity. With squares, you’ve got these neighbours that might or might not count as neighbours, depending on how you want to interpret that. Squares have only 4, unless you’re counting diagonals, and then you’ve got 8. Obvious difference is a hex tile has 6 neighbours. Or Red Blob Games’ really cool demonstration of some stuff about hexagons. You might be interested in this blog post I read titled 20 Fun Facts about Hex Grids. It is several months old at this point, but that means I’ve given the subject a thorough going-over.īoard-game fans: Hex tile vs Square tile? A tweet got me thinking about hex and square tiles in board games.

Hexagon board game map