Thursday, 10 March 2022

Creating hex paper for campaign maps

While the 2nd Punic War armies are on the tabletop, this post is about an online tool for printing hexed paper for drawing campaign maps.


My wife, who is a Quilter, uses hexed graph paper of different sizes from time to time which are created on the site https://incompetech.com. Here you can create different sized hex prints from the section on graph paper. Be aware that there are a lot of ads on the site you have to navigate around to get to the Hexagonal Graph Paper PDF Generator. The generator allows you to enter the hex size, line colour, and paper size, then generate and download a PDF for printing.


Setting the size of hexes and paper.

A hex where the paper margins were adjusted.

A larger size hex used without any paper margin adjustment.

This tool will be useful for creating some small campaign maps in the future.

11 comments:

  1. Very useful tool. I have seen similar offerings geared toward board wargamers.

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    1. I like the way you can adjust the hex size.

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  2. Very useful - I've saved a shortcut to it. I wasn't sure how the hexagons were being measured at first but after a test print it seems the dimension you input is the length of a side i.e., half the point-to-point width or the length of the sides of the equilateral triangles that form the hexagon.
    I assume the armies are on the table for the Battle of Ateste?

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    1. Yes, the armies are the Battle of Ateste the next campaign game which has been fought and a blog post is to be written.

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  3. Or you could just go to the Kallistra web site and download their grids ... https://www.kallistra.co.uk/index.php?page=72

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  4. Yes, that site's been around forever. I've used it to make hex templates for putting hex grids on my tabletop felt cloth. Just keep fooling with the parameters and doing test prints until you get a good size for your miniatures. Then I punch holes in the hex vertices and use a marker to put dots on the cloth at those vertices.

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    1. Indeed, very useful for scaling up and using as a template.

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  5. One neat part about Cyberboard is that it will also generate the grid 'on top' of any map you want. it takes some time to figure out the sizes and positioning so that each 'hex' works out to the size of the distances on the map.

    Used it for the Campaign of Nations map.

    http://campaignofnations.blogspot.com/p/campaign-map-of-central.html

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    1. Thanks for the tip and example with the map, very effective.

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