Google's Simple Games and Rule Variants - Boardigami

Did this ever happen to you? You're getting ready to play some strategy game or other, but you misplaced all your hex grid paper, and all you can find is a pen and a couple pieces of paper. Here's how you can get an accurate hex grid whipped up. Also nice for triangular grids or replacing lost Car Wars turning keys.

What you need:

• A pencil
• Two pieces of paper

Setup:

This right here is going to be a bit of basic geometry you probably learned in High School and promptly forgot, but there's no math at all required the way I'm going to show it to you.

• Step 1: Take a piece of paper, ideally a fairly small one, and fold it into thirds from the corner, as shown in Fig. 1. You basically grab the left side and the bottom, fold the whole thing into something of an S, and make sure the edges all line up before you crease it down. If done properly, you now have a nice, perfect, 30° angle wedge.
• Step 2: Unfold one side just to save yourself some trouble. Now measure out how long you want one hex edge to be (yeah, I know you don't have a ruler, eyeball it) from the pointiest bit of your triangle to some point along the fold, as in Fig. 2. You might also want to try folding up the rest of that paper so you have a nice straight line down from that mark for a nice handle/guide for 90° angles later on.
• Step 3:Now take your second piece of paper, which I'd hope is on the huge side since it's going to be your map, line up your happy triangle with the edges of the paper as shown in Fig. 3 and start drawing those lines. You should have no problem covering the whole thing with equal sized, perfect hexagons now, unless you accidently use the 60° side or something.

Variants:

• Triangular Grids: All you need to do here is you that other angle on your little key (at the top of Fig. 2) and use that for all your angles. So to get started, you'd take that first step from Fig. 3 and tilt the key 90° to get started.
• Other Angles: Hopefully I don't need to explain this, but if you fold that spare 30° angle you have in half, you get a 15° angle, fold the paper in half from one of the uncreased corners for a 45° angle, and I think you're go to go for Car Wars... although it's sloppy.

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