The History of Hex Grid Games — From Kriegsspiel to Modern Strategy Boards

Hexagons are everywhere in modern tabletop gaming. Hex strategy game islands, Martian colonization game maps, the hexcrawl wilderness of old-school tabletop RPGs, the tactical maps of classic hex-grid war games and popular sci-fi grand strategy hex board games — the hex grid is the defining geometric choice of the medium. Why? This is the history.

Why Hexagons? The Geometry

Before the history, the math — because the hex grid's dominance comes from a specific geometric property. A hexagon has six edges and six neighbors (in a flat-top or pointy-top configuration). The key property: all six neighbors are at the same distance from the center. This is not true of square grids.

In a square grid, the four edge-adjacent neighbors are at distance 1 (one square width). But the four diagonal neighbors are at distance √2 ≈ 1.41. This diagonal distance discrepancy is the source of one of war gaming's longest-running debates: should diagonal movement cost 1 or 2 movement points? Neither answer is correct — diagonal distance in reality is 1.41, and the square grid has no clean way to represent it.

The hex grid eliminates this problem entirely. With six equidistant neighbors, movement in any of the six directions costs the same. Range circles produce approximately circular footprints. Line-of-sight calculations are consistent in all directions. The geometry is clean in a way the square grid isn't.

Honeybees discovered this property before mathematicians formalized it: hexagonal packing is the most efficient tessellation of a plane with equal-area cells. Nature gravitates toward hexagons for the same reason game designers do — they're geometrically optimal.

Kriegsspiel and the Origins of War Game Grids (1812–1900s)

The intellectual ancestor of hex grid games is Kriegsspiel — "war game" in German — developed by Prussian military officer Georg von Reisswitz in 1812 and formalized with his son in 1824. Kriegsspiel used a gridded map, unit counters, and rules for movement, combat, and terrain effects. It was adopted by the Prussian Army as a training tool and spread to other European militaries over the following decades.

Early Kriegsspiel used irregular terrain maps without a regular grid. The first war games to use formal square grids appeared in the late 19th century as the genre spread to civilian hobbyists. H.G. Wells's "Little Wars" (1913) — the first commercially published miniature war game — used free-form measurement rather than a grid, but its publication signaled the arrival of miniature gaming as a civilian hobby.

Square grids dominated early 20th century war game designs, primarily because they were easy to draw and reason about. The diagonal movement problem was acknowledged but accepted as a limitation of the format.

The Hex Grid Arrives in War Gaming (1950s–60s)

The modern hex grid game was pioneered by Charles Roberts, who founded a pioneering hex wargame publisher in 1954 and published the first commercially successful hex-grid war game. He adopted the hexagonal grid to solve the diagonal movement problem and produce more realistic range calculations. The choice proved influential.

Through the 1960s, that publisher and competing hex wargame publishers developed an extensive catalog of hex-grid war games covering virtually every major military conflict: Gettysburg, D-Day, Stalingrad, Midway, Waterloo. The hex grid became the defining feature of the "war game" genre — so strongly associated that "hex and counter" became shorthand for the entire genre.

The design innovation that made these games work was the Zone of Control (ZOC) mechanic: units in a hex exerted control over their six adjacent hexes, affecting enemy movement through those spaces. This mechanic emerged directly from the hex grid's equidistant neighbor property — it would be geometrically awkward on a square grid.

D&D and the Hexcrawl (1974)

When the founders of the tabletop dungeon RPG genre published their landmark game in 1974, they faced a terrain management problem: how do you map a wilderness region that characters explore over months of play? Their answer, drawn from the war game tradition they both came from, was the hex map.

The original game's wilderness exploration used hexagonal maps where each hex represented a specific terrain type — grassland, forest, mountains, swamp, desert — and random encounter tables generated encounters appropriate to that terrain. Navigation, weather, and resource management all operated at the hex scale. This "hexcrawl" format became a cornerstone of old-school tabletop RPG play.

The early tabletop RPG hex map was functional, not visual. Each hex was annotated with terrain type and encounter information. The hexes were a navigation tool, not a terrain display. But the vocabulary of hex maps as representing landscape terrain — each hex = a type of environment — was established in tabletop gaming culture from 1974 onward.

This vocabulary is exactly what the next generation of hex board games inherited two decades later.

PC Strategy Games and the Digital Hex Map (1990s–2010s)

A landmark PC strategy title (1991) brought hex map strategy to a mass computer gaming audience. The original release used a square grid, but it established the genre archetype — territory consisting of discrete tile units, each with terrain type properties affecting movement cost and resource yield — that subsequent entries in the franchise would eventually express in the cleaner hexagonal format. A later sequel (2010) made the switch to full hex grid, and the franchise's massive audience normalized hex-grid strategy for a generation of players who had no prior war game experience.

A Breakthrough Board Game: The Hex Tile as Physical Centerpiece (1995)

A landmark hex strategy game designed by its German designer was published in Germany in 1995 and won the German game-of-the-year award — one of the most prestigious awards in board gaming. Its core innovation was making the hex tile a tactile, physical, reconfigurable object rather than a printed map.

The game's 19 hex tiles are shuffled and randomly arranged each game to create a different island configuration. Each tile type (wheat, ore, pasture, forest, brick, desert) has specific resource generation properties. The physical act of building the island — laying tiles, placing number tokens, positioning harbors — became a ritual component of the game experience.

Those physical hex tiles triggered an entirely new product category: premium hex terrain. Players who fell in love with the game began seeking upgraded versions of its defining physical element — the hex tile itself. This is the origin of the hex terrain upgrade market that Glowrune now participates in.

The game sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages. It is the most culturally widespread hex strategy board game in history, and its defining physical feature is the hexagonal terrain tile. For millions of people, "hex game" meant this game before it meant anything else.

Modern Hex Grid Games (2000s–Present)

The 2000s and 2010s saw an explosion of hex-grid games across every genre. A selective timeline:

• Popular sci-fi grand strategy hex board games (1997+): Epic sci-fi strategy with a galaxy built from hexagonal sector tiles. Each game creates a different galaxy configuration — the modular hex tile as dynamic game architecture.
• Hex strategy game expansions (2005+): Ocean-themed expansions extended the hex tile system with ocean tiles and island exploration, further establishing hex terrain as the physical language of hex strategy games.
• Martian colonization hex board games (2016): A hex tile system representing the Martian surface, with tiles representing different terrain types that players place to terraform the planet. Multi-million copy bestsellers.
• Popular dungeon-crawl board games (2017+): Dungeon crawl RPGs using hex-grid rooms and corridors for tactical miniature combat. Among the highest-rated board games ever published.
• Major PC strategy titles (2010s): Full hex grid, tile improvements visible on the map, terrain types affecting game mechanics — the clearest expression of hex map strategy in mainstream gaming.

Where Hex Terrain Is Going

The hex grid's prevalence in games is unlikely to diminish — its geometric advantages are permanent. What's changing is what physical hex terrain looks like.

Premium hex terrain has evolved from standard cardboard tiles to resin-cast sculpted pieces to, now, illuminated electronic terrain tiles. The core question — how do you make a flat hexagonal tile feel like terrain — has new answers available in 2026 that weren't possible even five years ago.

Glowrune's illuminated hex tiles represent the current frontier: 25 individually addressable RGBW LEDs producing per-tile animations, swappable art layers serving multiple game themes, and magnetic electrical connectors that eliminate wiring. The hex tile that a breakthrough German board game made a cultural object in 1995 has become a platform for an entirely new kind of game table experience. See the Hex Core Set →