What Are You Playing Right Now, Part 2: Daggerfall

[halfeye]

There's a sort of stigma associated with using hexes. When I was growing up, hexes were only used by the hardest of hardcore wargamers. The type that would write a game with no animations but which accurately tracks the number of bullets a Vickers machine gun could fire. A level of hardcore even deeper than Hearts of Iron or Crusader Kings.

Hexes were considered inaccessible. Hard for people to learn. Something that would instantly turn a casual gamer off and prevent them from trying out a game.

I'm not making an argument either way for the actual benefits of hexes vs squares. But that stigma has been there for well over 20 years, and game designers are going to be very conscious of that. Civilization is designed to be accessible, ergo it uses squares. I'm not sure what changed to make them decide to give hexes a try. Possibly it's down to more modern games deciding to use hexes, meaning that people are more likely to be familiar with them. Or maybe the Civ fanbase has gotten more focused in their demographic and it's better to appeal to that fanbase than to try and attract newcomers.

There are squares, there are squares skewed on their tips, and there are hexes; I thought Alpha Centauri (was that Civ 2.5 or 3.5?) was hexes, but looking at the box it's probably skewed squares.