We Have Free Movement!

So What?

Fleet Command Hevelius was originally built for a hex grid. You can see echoes of this foundation throughout the ruleset: 2” bases, hex-shaped terrain, Speed and Falloff ratings listed in even numbers, mechanics for turning… the list goes on. Two key factors in changing that were accessibility and affordability (with player experience underpinning both).

Starting Point: Hex Grid

There is a world in which Fleet Command Hevelius’ hex grid never went away (and maybe one where it comes back). A core design trend behind our system is how the gameplay and narrative interweave with each other, and something about the fixed gridline movement made a player feel like a fleet commander positioning forces on a tactical interface. The vibe was less about simulating complex movements for individual units on a simple plane, and more about simulating a strategist issuing broad orders to subordinates while they carried out the details before reporting back to you.

Our hex grid did that superbly. It also made a number of calculations pretty easy: You didn’t have to measure whether a ship was half an inch out of range, you just had to count hexes (and then take away one damage die for each hex beyond your falloff range). You didn’t have to hand-measure a 60-degree turn, you just had to match the next hex facet over. You didn’t have to worry about the nuance of ship proximity, you just had to check if two hexes were adjacent to each other.

It was a system where your mental energy went to placing a ship in the right position - not figuring out the nuance of how exactly to move it in the first place.

But Players Like(d) The Nuance

The first strike against the grid movement came from that tradeoff in precision. There is something attractive about nuance in wargames, in being able to take a 4’x 6’ board space and zoom in on the 3” that will determine whether you will win or lose this battle. The feel between free movement and grid-based movement is difficult to quantify, but our play testers had surprisingly strong opinions nonetheless.

That on its own wasn’t a dealbreaker. It was possible we just hadn’t found the right audience for that style of gameplay. Still, it was something to get the wheels turning - the question we continually ask ourselves is whether our systems are the right tools to tell our stories, or just the systems we had been using at the time.

Accessibility (And Cost) in Required Materials

The second strike was that while play mats may be common, they are not ubiquitous. Play mats with a 2” hex grid are much more difficult to find in the average storefront. This presented a bit of a challenge in how to ensure that a newcomer to Fleet Command Hevelius would be able to jump in and play.

Something that we wanted to encourage in our initial release was a “play anywhere” mindset. Models agnostic, terrain that you could represent with 2D cardboard cutouts… as long as you had a base and a d10, we wanted you to be able to take to the stars on your own terms. Requiring a specialized play mat introduced some friction to that.

The options boiled down to offering a play mat as part of a starter kit, or having you go out and find one on your own. Either way introduced cost and took away convenience. Even a basic poster-style mat would have to factor in shipping and printing, and would be at risk of needing replaced through wear and tear. A premium rubber or vinyl mat would last longer, but at an even greater cost to you.

They are also more cumbersome to carry. Your local game store (or a friend willing to try our system with you) might have a play available in their game room, but what are the odds it’s got the 2” hexes Fleet Command Hevelius was built around? That means you can essentially never have a spontaneous games unless you bring a custom mat with you everywhere.

Re-Rewriting the Rules

We liked the grid system because of what it added to our game. It turned out we accidentally designed a system where not having a mat took more away from the game than having one added to it. So a few extra nights later, we had the rules rewritten to reflect grid-free movement.

Taking out hexes and putting in tape measurers was more straightforward than we had originally expected. Shifting the scale from “One 2-inch Hex” to “One Inch” mostly meant doubling a few numbers and rewriting a few phrases to account for the change. However, there were a few places where we had taken hex-based movement for granted.

A hex-based system means overlap doesn’t happen. Your ship is either in front of, behind, or next to your opponents’ ship. There’s never a situation where you accidentally overlap by a fraction of an inch, or where moving “through” an opposing ship means measuring exactly how much you clear it by to determine where you end up.

For Objectives and Small Craft, what used to be “adjacent” or “same hex” was now a similar challenge of writing in enough nuance to our rules language to ward off the most likely arguments about proximity. We found a lot of these little “good enough” descriptions that suddenly were not “good enough”.

The result is a relatively tight system that now allows you to play anywhere you have a 2” hex base; a d10; and a measuring device. It’s still a barrier to “play anywhere”, and it’s still not quite the same experience as with a well-detailed nebula (and terrain pieces) to fight over, but it’s definitely a step up from carrying a roll of neoprene everywhere you travel. Or so we’re told anyway - we carry a minimum of two in our demo kits, meaning we’ll just have to take your word for it!

So What?

It would have been really, really easy for us to decide that a hex mat was the beginning and end of our measurement system. Our game would have looked a lot different today if we had. Our distribution system would too.

Wargame Vault’s print on demand service is a great fit for our scale at the moment. Its digital storefront connects us with players around the world who are interested in narrative-rich settings and starship combat that feels like it’s taking place in the far future.

If we had to ensure you had a dedicated mat to even try Fleet Command Hevelius, that would have forced us to buy palettes of books and mats in bulk - each of which we would have to store, pack, and ship by hand. It would have forced you to know about our site in advance, which would mean even higher marketing costs. It would have meant higher upkeep and overhead, which means higher prices to get our game into your hands.

We didn’t think about it in those terms before, but it was something we realized toward the end of our development cycle. Listening to our playtesters and critically reviewing our ruleset let us take “good enough” and reduce quite a few barriers between an interesting-looking book and something you get to play.

A funny (embarrassing) story as a post script: We learned early after our shift to grid-free movement that tape measurers only do so much to support accessibility. We forgot to bring one to our first conference play test, and none of the vendors (even the wargame oriented ones) had any for sale! We improvised and had a great session, but to this day keep at least four on hand “just in case.”