WANTED: A Good Hex-Crawl Board Game

For the last decade or so, I've been moderately obsessed with the idea of creating (or modifying an existing version of) a hex-crawl board game. This post is an overview of my concept for the project.

First, what is a hex-crawl? The original version of the Dungeons and Dragons product line (the three-booklet boxed set from the early 70s) was essentially four games in one. First, it was a dungeon exploration game, about a small team of adventurers exploring an underground site filled with monsters and treasure. Second, it was a wilderness exploration game, about a troop of adventurers exploring an hostile unknown land, discovering sites that could be explored (as "dungeons" for the first game), but also for the pure joy of discovery and cartography. Third, it was a domain building game, about carving out a fiefdom from the wilderness and building a castle on it, with peasant farmers to defend and a force of loyal knights and mercenaries to defend it. Finally, it was a tactical wargame, with the clash of rival domains being played out on a field of battle with miniatures figures.

Historically, the last part of this sequence was created first. All RPGs were originally derived from a medieval miniature wargame called Chainmail, by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Gygax's sometime-collaborator Dave Arneson came up with the idea of scaling down the miniature battles to a man-to-man scale, and then discarded the battle entirely to create the dungeon exploration game that eventually evolved into what we'd today call an "RPG". (Then Gygax wrote his own rules and built an intellectual-property empire around them - though that's another story!)

The other two game systems, the wilderness exploration game and the kingdom builder, have mostly been forgotten and underutilized. The term "hex crawl" refers to any game that includes at least the first component, and possibly the second component as well, even if it doesn't literally use the old stand-by trope of a hexagon-grid map.

Quite a few board games have been created to simulate the "dungeon crawl" experienced of a classic RPG. Board Game Geek rates over 100 of them, including Talisman, Descent, Heroquest, Cave Troll, and simple old classics like TSR's Dungeon! and a zillion versions of Munchkin. This reflects, I imagine, the popularity of this theme in the RPG world.

Hex crawls are quite a bit rarer in both the RPG world and the board game world. Unlike dungeon crawls, they tend to use a realistic overland map with terrain features that heavily influence movement and exploration. Unlike 4X strategy games, they usually don't involve moving around a large set of dispersed armies, but focus on the exploits of a single company of heroes that can't be everywhere at once.

I've been trying to keep track of all the hex crawl games I've seen released. All of them have been in the fantasy genre. My rather short list includes:

• Magic Realm: A quite good (but also quite complex) game from 1977.
• Wizards: A similar early game from the same era by Avalon Hill, which I've never played.
• Runebound: A more recent game with good production values, but which frustrated me due to poor playtesting (a similar second edition was released to correct problems, but I've never played it).
• Mage Knight: A popular modern iteration of the genre, with stronger 4X economic components. Rather expensive.

I've specifically excluded games in which terrain is presented more abstractly, or that use a fixed map with little exploration component. Even Runebound is debatable, in that it doesn't have much randomization of map features (although there are additional maps included in expansion sets).

Modern games (including hex crawls) have moved away from simulationist aspects of gaming, preferring to emphasize abstracted mechanics like deck management and tile placement, and lots of theme-heavy "event" cards. While I like most of these features, I find that they tend to eclipse the core mechanics of the game, with the result that the game starts to feel as though it's "playing itself", with only minimal input from the player. In Runebound, for example, dice rolls determine how your hero can move, with the result that you can't enter those mountains unless you roll the right result on the movement dice. In Mage Knight, a deck-building mechanism forces players to draw cards to determine what actions they're allowed to take, creating some turns in which you can't attack, and other turns in which you can't do anything but attack!

My interest is in creating a game that has

• heavy emphasis on exploration and discovery
• intermediate complexity (lower than Magic Realm, higher than Runebound)
• classic flavor that emphasizes unrestricted player agency (no gimmick mechanics)
• reasonable accuracy as a simulation (well, allowing room for some tropes of the fantasy genre)
• the ability to play historical games on real-world maps with more limited fantasy elements
• an appealing solo play option

I've already taken a first pass at writing a set of rules for this. So far it borrows quite a few of its mechanisms from RPGs and computer games.

A small number of recent RPG products have implemented hex crawl elements, including Paizo's Kingmaker and John Stater's Land of NOD series (the latter very much in the tradition of the original Judge's Guild releases). Some computer games (Heroes of Might and Magic, King's Bounty) have explored the same concepts successfully, though often with more limited attention to simulationist concerns. I'm particularly anticipating the release of Expeditions: Conquistador and Meriwether, two computer games under development that seem to export the hex crawl concept to specific historical setting in North America (a very natural fit, given the importance of exploration in early American history). I'd like to find ways to integrate some of the same concepts into a board game that could be played competitively, cooperatively, or solo.