First goofing around with pieces on the table of a new game I’ve been thinking about off and on for a bit now: Baleful.

Next day update: Now we’ve got a whole world to play in!

Most fundamentally, codifying line of sight and movement with straight walls over the hex grid was looking to be too complex. Definitely possible, but lots of awkward edge cases and not fast to play. So now all the terrain is on hex bases so that it can clearly occupy entire cells. The segments with angled ends are to enable making right angle corners in the walls. It looks a little funny with the odd indentation where walls meet, but the readability for gameplay is very clear, and it looks and plays a lot better than having lots of 60° corners.

The scatter terrain is a mix of computer consoles (two-hex segments), equipment (bigger boxes), crates (smaller boxes), and barrels (cylinders). They provide cover as well as serving as objectives.

A long long time ago I made a very simple prototype sci-fi dungeon crawl using 20mm Micro Machines Star Wars figures that my buddy Daryl and I played a bunch of times. It used hex tiles rather than the standard dungeon crawl square grid tiles. They were a real pain to cut out, but made for a different tactical experience. That prototype also had neat little 3D papercraft crates and computer consoles on which I’d drawn screens and controls and such, so this harkens back to that nicely. By far the highlight of those testing sessions was when the Rebels unlocked a door and accidentally let loose a Rancor. Fun times were had by all!