A new terrain project with hexes

A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and buy the Hex Terrain Toolkit (HTT) designed and sold by Ross Kearns here in the UK. The HTT was originally available via Kickstarter but is now on general sale.

https://www.hexterraintoolkit.com/

The idea behind the HTT is that you use a series of wooden jigs to build your own modular hex terrain out of polystyrene. The hexes measure 100mm from corner to opposite corner, which is about 87mm across the flats. At the most basic level the HTT allows you to make simple flat hexes and sloping hills, but additional jigs allow you to add rivers and cliffs, as well as a 'snowflake' style system for securing all the hexes in place on the table.

It's a neat little design, and given my liking for hex-based gaming it's something which I should have plenty of use for. Although I already have a growing collection of Kallistra terrain (which I intend to keep using), I liked the idea of using slightly smaller hexes, particular for my 10mm collections. There is also something very appealing about the natural, organic flow of the HTT's sloping hills, and the fact that using a polystyrene-based modular system offers a lot of possibilities, if one is able to use a bit of imagination.

This week I snatched some time here and there to start practising with the toolkit, starting off by using some waste polystyrene packaging to cut basic hexes, a few river sections and a couple of hills. Yesterday I also received some extruded polystyrene in the post, which so far I've found easier to work with than expanded polystyrene.

Above, you can see my first efforts. The grey tiles are the extruded polystyrene. It's much denser than the white packaging stuff, and gives a cleaner cut. Going forward with this project, I intend to use this material rather than expanded polystyrene.

From this angle you can see the hill hexes at the back. Each tile is 15mm deep, and a basic hill is two tiles high, then going up in 15mm increments. Hills can be made with one, two or three high corners (the two you can just see in this photo both have two high points), and there's a option to use a steeper slope for higher hills. It will take a bit of practice cutting the hills to ensure they look as natural as possible, but I think I should get the hang of it quite quickly. The two models in the picture are 6mm buildings by Total Battle Miniatures to give you an idea of scale. Although these hexes will work especially well with my 10mm minis, I think they'll also have great potential for use with my Newline Designs 20mm collections.

Here I've given some of the tiles a bit of paint, prior to adding some static grass etc. I'm still experimenting with what will look best. The rivers you see are cut more or less freehand rather than using the jig. The jig will give you very clean, uniform river straights and bends, but I wanted something a bit more natural looking. Cutting them freehand is easy enough - the main thing is to make sure each end is the same width so they match up. When using my 20mm miniatures, single-hex waterways will be more like a stream, while rivers will be two or more hexes wide.

The extruded polystyrene is an interesting material to work with. I'd never used it before, and hadn't really been aware of just how widely it's used with crafters and model-builders. It's a very easy material to cut and shape, but still reasonably sturdy. This stone wall is something I did in about 10 minutes, playing about with an off-cut. It glues easily with PVA, and the surface takes paint very well. I imagine it should be easy to add filler and other textures to it, too.

At the moment I'm using a handheld hot wire cutter to make the hexes, but I think I'll invest in a tabletop hot wire cutter - probably the one by Proxxon. This will speed the whole project up a bit, and allow me to make use of the styrene for other modelmaking projects.

In the course of starting this project I found some wonderful examples of hexes made by people who are using the Hex Terrain Toolkit, and people who use styrene to make some fantastic models.

Some great examples of hex tiles made using the HTT:
https://toysoldiersofftowar.blogspot.com/

Gerard Boom from Shifting Lands is a great source of inspiration for making styrene models. He also designs and sells mdf tools for use with the Proxxon hot wire cutter:
https://www.shiftinglands.com/

Ross Kearns, the HTT inventor, also has a series of YouTube videos with tips on how to use the various jigs
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgVcLDhucUt0SzKXeDsxczQ

More hex terrain goodness to follow...

Commands & Colors using Hexon - at last, some focus!

Some enjoyable time was spent this weekend putting down a few random pieces of Hexon terrain and looking again at the best way of making them work with my 20mm Napoleonics. Having abandoned the idea of my 6-inch hexes and chipboard table, I needed to come up with something that would be smaller and more convenient to set up and use.

I like Hexon. It's a great product, and although the hex sizes are probably best suited to 6 to 15mm figures, I think I can just about get away with squeezing my 20mm minis on them. The size of the units might not be as grand as what I had originally intended, but they still look fairly decent.

Figure-wise, I can fit four bases of infantry and four bases of cavalry on a hex quite comfortably. It's a bit more of a squeeze for hexes with buildings or trees, but still possible. The hills work well too. The slopes are high enough to give some reasonable elevation, but are also gentle enough for my bases not to fall off.

I have enough Hexon already for a standard C&C board, along with plenty of hills, but I need to add some river sections and get them finished up, as well as paint the buildings I bought from Total Battle Miniatures. Other features like bridges, redoubts, lakes etc, will also need to be considered.

Rather than using casualty markers, I can also use bases to represent blocks on a like-for-like basis, so I'll remove bases as they're lost throughout the game. Some players don't like figure removal in games, but it's always been my preferred way of playing. I like the table to be free of tokens or markers as much as possible. The only exception will be artillery, which I'll represent with a single base and use some sort of markers.

So, I'm happy that I've finally settled on a way forward for this project. I'll be back to more regular posts from now on, so I'll share more on this project soon.

Having a rethink...

The finished board - big, but a bother to move about

The past month or so has been pretty much a write-off in terms of available hobby time. As normally happens when work and other things take over, I tend to lose my momentum a little bit with projects, so when time does become available I've run out of steam somewhat.

Enough of the complaining though. Life is returning to normal once more, so I'm slowly climbing back on the baggage train.

As you can see in the photo, I did at least mange to finish making my Commands & Colors board. All six chipboard sections are done - all hexed up and flocked. I should be pleased, but...

A bird's-eye view of the board with seating space for an impossibly slim opponent

But, I'm having second thoughts. In the process of laying out the boards for the first time, I realised just how much space the whole thing takes up. Silly, really, since I had calculated all this beforehand, so it should have been no surprise. And it's not just the space requirement - it's that the boards are quite heavy and cumbersome to move, with the added hazard of getting a splinter or two. All in all, the effort was enough to be annoying.

Some 10mm buildings from Total Battle Miniatures - still to be painted

On the up side, the boards do look ok. I'm happy with the flocked surface and the level of visibility of the hex lines. Each section lines up well, even if the chipboard is a bit roughly along some edges. As far as the hex sizes go, 150cm is a good size for the number of bases I had decided to use to represent the units.

The number of troops needed, however, is another reason for me having second thoughts. Despite having painted a fairly large amount of Prussians and French, I'm still not even half way to being done, which is a tad daunting.

So, I'm having a rethink.

I think using this size of board might be a bit too ambitious and impractical. I need to consider something smaller that also uses fewer troops. What I really want to do is actually feel like I'm nearly finished with the Prussians and French, so that I can move on to other painting projects.

At the moment, I'm looking afresh at my collection of Hexon terrain. I had dismissed these 4-inch hexes as being too small for my 20mm Napoleonics, but they do have a lot to recommend them. It means I'd have to use a much smaller footprint for each unit, but then that's what I want anyway. They will be much easier to set up and clear away, and my dining table can comfortably accommodate a standard 13 x 9 hex C&C layout.

I'll post more on this next time. I have pretty much all the hexon I need, except for some more river sections and a bridge or two.

The flocked chipboards will probably be relegated to the garage in the meantime, perhaps to return one day in the future when I have a bigger collection of painted minis.

The 6-inch hex and its metric cousin

Having settled on 6-inch hexes as the best compromise between hex size and table size, I ended up shrinking this ever so slightly. I'll explain.

My new gaming area is going to be a spare room in the house which is big enough to accommodate an 8 x 4 foot table reasonably comfortably. I will be able to walk round both ends of the table and also have a decent amount of space along each side. As a maximum, I could extend this to 10 x 5, but for now I'm aiming for 8 x 4 as my ideal size.

I'm planning to use chipboard loft panels as my gaming surface. They measure 4 feet long by a little over 1 foot wide, and are tongued and grooved so they'll fit together fairly snugly. The room is used for other activities besides gaming, so I need to be able to dismantle my table and store it away somewhere, hence my idea to use the loft panels (on top of fold-away tables or trestles, probably).

After some quick calculations, however, I realised that using 6-inch hexes would be slightly too big to fit a standard Commands and Colors 13 x 9 hex area onto a 4-foot wide table. The ninth hex on the short side would be cut-off slightly, and if I ever wanted to increase the depth to 11 hexes in order to play an epic battle, then I'd need more than 5 feet of width, which would be too tight for the room.

Anyway, the short story is I reduced the hex size from 6 inches to 150mm, which is only about 2mm smaller but means I can just fit 9 hexes inside a 4-foot wide board.

So, with that decided, I started drawing out the hex grid onto the panels today (a job still in progress), and also spent some time pondering how best to cover the surface. Should I use flock or should I keep it simple and just use paint? I wasn't - and I'm still not - entirely sure, so I did a quick experiment first of all with making a flocked hex on one of the board's undersides. I like the look of it, and the colour of the board underneath helps to break up the green a bit.

Another advantage is that the flock will match my figure bases quite closely, and it'll provide a bit of friction to keep terrain tiles in place. But, one drawback is that the surface won't be completely flat, so any terrain tiles might sit on top of the flock slightly unevenly. There's also the added time involved in flocking the whole board, and the fact that the flock does tend to shed fibres somewhat.

I'll need to ponder this some more before I decide. I might need to order some hexes first and see how well they sit on top of the flock.

Back in the real world, it was not a bad day at all here in Stirling, if a little fresh, so my better half and I headed out for a walk around Bannockburn, starting off in Cambusbarron and heading up to Gillies Hill before working our way down to Bannockburn and the visitors' centre. It's a nice way to spend an hour or two if you've never walked that way before, and a good way to approach the battlefield site.

The heritage trail at Gillies Hill. You're on the west side of the battlefield at this point.

Crossing over the Bannock Burn. Still on the west side of the battlefield at this point, behind where Bruce's army would have been.