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A hex map, hex board, or hex grid is a game board design commonly used in simulation games of all scales, including , role-playing games, and in both and . A hex map is subdivided into a hexagonal tiling, small regular polygon of identical size.
One disadvantage of a hex map is that hexes have adjacent cells in only six directions instead of eight, as in a square grid map. Commonly, cells will form continuous straight lines "up" and "down", or "north" and "south", in which case the other four adjacent cells lie "north-west", "north-east", "south-west" and "south-east". As a result, no hex cell has an adjacent hex cell lying directly east or west of it, making "horizontal" movement in a straight line impossible. Instead, paths in these directions, and any other path that does not bisect one of the six cell edges, will "zig-zag"; since no two directions are orthogonal, it is impossible to move forward in one direction without moving backwards slightly in the other.
Games that traditionally use the four cardinal directions, or otherwise suit a square grid, may adapt to a hex grid in different ways. For example, hexagonal chess replaces the four directions of orthogonal movement (along ranks and files) with the six directions to adjacent cells, through cell edges. The four directions of diagonal movement are likewise replaced with the six directions that lie through vertices of the cell; these "diagonal" movements travel along the edge between a pair of adjacent cells before arriving at another cell. A three-colour grid aids in visualising this movement, since it preserves the traditional chessboard's property that pieces moving diagonally land only on cells of the same colour.
The hex map has also been popular for role-playing game wilderness maps. They were used in the Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets of the 1980s and related TSR products. GDW also used a hex grid map in mapping space for their science-fiction RPG Traveller.
A number of are played on a hex grid, such as
Several Chess variant have also been invented for a hex board.
The television game show Blockbusters (1980–1982, 1987) was also based on a hex grid.
Early examples of strategy video games that use hex maps include 1983's Nobunaga's Ambition, 1989's Military Madness (the first entry in the Nectaris series), and 1991's Master of Monsters. The first Civilization had a hex map version during development, but designers decided against it because "the world was not ready ... it was too freaky". While the first four iterations of the popular Civilization computer game franchise used square maps, Civilization V, Civilization VI, and Civilization VII use hexagonal maps. Other games that use hex maps are The Battle for Wesnoth, Dragon Age Journeys, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Forge of Empires and UniWar.
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