Thursday, September 22, 2011

A Second Try at a Home Made Hex Mat?

As I mentioned last week, I got my hex mat from Hotz Matt. I still have not had a chance to use it. I don't regret getting is, but I feel the need to triumph in making my own hex mat. My costly failed attempt using a pre-made hex template still nags me. As an update to the story, my daughter "borrowed" the 4' x 4' interlocking foam mats and built herself a stuffed animal storage box with them. In addition to my Hotz Matt, I wouldn't mind having a mat in black for starship combat.

Pahoota, over at his Solipsist Gaming blog site describes a clever technique for making a homemade hex mat. The boundaries of Pahoota's hexes are a little different. They consist of equilateral triangles with concave sides. These represent the points were three circles of equal diameter come together:


If you keep adding on more circles, what you will get are hex boundaries:


You get the idea.... For circles, I thought I would try using soda bottle caps. They are consistent in diameter and easy to get. The trick will be to make sure the three bottle caps line up properly so that you get an equilateral triangle. Playing around with some soda bottle caps, it is not easy to get them to line up just so.

Once again, another project to work on.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the mention, but I must reveal my sources... I first saw the idea on using circles to make hex mats on TerraGenesis. The tutorial there uses 9" paper plates however, which makes hexes waaayyy too big for my tastes.

    Keep going with your bottle cap idea. I suggest you take 19 of them, arrange them to form a hex-within-a-hex pattern, and then bind them all together using CA glue and something cheap and easy to cut (chopsticks or even better thick spaghetti)

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  2. Thanks for the heads up! I'll be headed the next few days to Walmart for some felt or thick cloth.

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