How to make a Commands and Colors hex mat (New Zealand version)

Many moons ago I posted a piece here on how to make a hex mat. 

Unfortunately, I was not able to bring that mat with me to New Zealand, and for six years I have been without a suitable sward on which to play the glorious game Commands & Colors: Ancients. Attempts to obtain a mat here have produced mixed results. I ordered a commercial version which never arrived; I tried making a dodgy off-set squares mat of my own. 

It seemed fate had dealt me a lousy hand. Would I ever play Commands & Colors: Ancients in the proper way again?

Well, last weekend I got notification through my phone of a sale at a store called Spotlight. It's where New Zealanders go when they want to get a relatively affordable set of curtains, a duvet cover, bits and pieces for sewing. Who could resist a 60% off sale on such potentially useful household items? So in I wandered to have a look at their tasteful net curtains and fabrics. Lo and behold: they had some lovely off-green felt, 90cm deep. 

There was a stirring in my soul. 

I asked for a piece 160cm long, and another 10cm long. This would allow hexes c.10cm from flat to flat 13 wide and 9 deep, as in the classic Commands and Colors configuration, as well as a scrap piece for experimentation.

Tools:

Cutting board, leather hole punch (or similar), straight-edge rulers, tape measure, marking dots, marker pen. 

Method:

Print off a template on A4 paper using a hex map generator. With this particular one the 'hexagon size' is the length of each hexside. 6cm gave me two hexes on a sheet of A4 with 10.4cm flat-to-flat, 12cm point-to-point. 

Mine printed too small initially - I had to increase the PDF size to 110% to be able to print the correct dimensions on paper. 

Use the leather punch to make a guide hole at each point of the two hexes.

With this initial template, mark out a larger template on cardboard, punch out the points, and on two of the hexes punch out the centre point as well. I used an opened out artist's wallet as I could get 4.5/5 x 5 hexes on it with the cardboard being easy to punch out but still being sturdy enough to do the job.  

Lay out the felt. 

Using tape measure and rulers, find the centre point of the fabric. Mark it with a dot sticker. Line up this sticker with the centre dot from your hex template and align the template with the fabric edge. 

Before you commence marking the dots on the fabric with your permanent marker, use a scrap piece of the fabric to test for sharpness, smudges, optimal pen size, etc. Better to do this now than risk it on the actual sheet. 

I tried a couple of colours, pen thicknesses and hex designs until I found the ones I liked best.

Returning to the mat, start marking the dots, being careful to make sure everything aligns as well as possible. 

I found out that perfection here is the enemy of the good. The fabric I had was 88cm deep in the centre and 90cm deep at one end. It looks terrible to our wargamerly OCD eyes at this stage when we are dot marking, but if you have fabric bunch or stretch it is better to have the hexes consistent with one another and excess fabric at the edges than to try to keep all the edges consistent and end up with misshapen hexes.

If the hexes are neat and even it will look good, even if the alignment with the edges turns out to have a bit of a slope to it. 

Once you have marked out the hex points, get your straight rule and start drawing the lines, being careful not to smudge them or lose concentration and draw a dud line. This is where you need to be accurate, but be accurate to your marked hex points, not to overall alignments. You will have some distortion and the lines will not be perfect. Accept that: just make sure that you are connecting your points as perfectly as you can and the effect will be good.

If, like me, you often enjoy a tipple while pursuing wargamerly ends, this is not the time to be working your way through half a bottle of vodka. You do not want to be having accidents with your permanent marker!

Stage one hex sides drawn. The lines are horribly out of alignment with one another, but you only notice this as you are marking it, not when you step back and look at the whole effect. Trust the process!

Continue marking the hex sides. Again, be accurate at the hex points so that the connections are clean. This is more important than getting geometric proportions exact. 

Stage two underway.

Once you get to the third stage, you will get a surge of joy.

Now it all comes together!

Keep going and you end up with something like this:

And then you can start playing! 

Including markers, this cost the princely sum of $15.00.