I have been watching a fair amount of tabletop gameplay recently and it made me want to do a few things.

First, design a tabletop game. Specifically tabletop versions of the turn based tactics video games I am working on. This would help me play test some of the game balance and mechanics without having to program them all into existence. (Explaining a rule to a computer can be very time consuming).

Second, it has made me want to fire up my 3D printer and make some simple models to move around for playtesting.

So What About Hexagons?

One of the things I am thinking about changing is from a standard grid to a hex grid for the “game board”.

I am 100% doing it for the tabletop version, although I like the grid version better right now for the video game. Why this matters is I am practicing modeling in Blender. I have done very very little of it so far but I am learning tons every day.

Right now I am making hexagon shaped bases for space ships to sit on (I may go into the specifics of how to do this in another post). Herein lies the problem. I need to scale them to the correct size in the slicer for the 3D printer.

The idea is to be able to play on a widely available play mats that you can find on Amazon or one of the various tabletop stores around. The vast majority of these use 1 inch hexagons. This means each side, face, edge, whatever you want to call it is 1 inch.

Now when you are scaling in the slicer for your 3D printer, you can’t choose to scale by the length of a face, you have to scale by the whole width and height. Thankfully, normal hexagons have a nice ratio of face to max width.

If your hexagon has 1 inch faces, then it should be 2 inches wide at the widest diameter (from a corner to the opposite corner). So now when you scale your model in your slicing software, you pick the dimension that will correlate to the wide diameter and set it to 2 inches (or 50.8 mm which is probably what it is measured in).

Now you have a properly sized hexagon that should fit nice and snug on a 1 inch hex grid map.\

Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.