Hexless Vector Movement

I've been buried in the world of flight test instrumentation, so my gaming rumination time has been suffering.  I've had enough of LabView and proto-boards for the night so I'm taking a break and getting back to my neglected blog.

So I finished my homebrew space miniatures game a few weeks ago and after all that work I think I'm not going to play it any longer.  My original goal was simplicity and even though War In Space is very simple, I've come up with an even easier game.  The newest one still needs playtesting but is truly a "beer-and-pretzels" game; if it got any more generic it would be called Backgammon.

The new game utilizes six sided dice only.  I love polyhedral dice, I really do, but during playtesting of War In Space one of the main annoyances was having to ensure I grabbed the proper types of dice for a ship during energy allocation.  The fact that those die types changed due to damage made it even easier to make mistakes and roll the wrong dice.  So last night I came up with this little d6 only game, and as soon as I finish typing this I'll go and playtest.

OK, on with the main point... I never finished painting the hex overlay on my vinyl home made space mat.  First I got distracted with some 10mm Ancients gaming, then of course school and work crushed any remaining opportunity or motivation.  Today however I came up with a new idea for hexless vector movement, which figures since I have a space mat with 40% of its surface covered with hexes.

The answer was in front of me all the time.  In the post regarding the conversion of my space mat, I described making little discs out of putty in order to help me make the hex pattern.  These discs are the answer I believe.  By placing one of these discs flush against the base of a spaceship miniature, a player can show the direction of ship's vector.  This requires marks on a round base but on a hex base the player can just push the disc flush with one of the hex sides.  For the magnitude of the vector, the player simply adds more discs in the appropriate direction, i.e. along a line extending from the flight stand rod through the center of that first disc.  I realize this sounds esoteric: the picture below illustrates:

Hexless (and ruler-less) vector movement

 In the picture above, the ship's velocity vector points to the right front 60 degrees right of the nose.  The snapshot shows the ship just before executing a move.  The ship's speed is 3 discs (each disc about the size of a 2 inch hex).  The controlling player would simply move the ship to the opposite end of this line of discs.  Two of the three discs would then be removed from the table and the remaining disc would be repositioned back to the front right 60 degree mark, to show the proper velocity vector.  Changing the direction of the velocity vector is easy to accomplish as well; simply move the disc from one hex side to an adjacent one.  My new game has specific rules on how to execute all these manuevers, but I'll leave that for the download.  Right now I just want to present the concept of hexless vector movement by using round markers.

As the above pictures show, the little putty discs can be decorated with acrylic paint in order to make them unobtrusive on the table.

Off to playtest, but here's an example of a ship readout from my new game... as you can see, very simple.

Beer-and-pretzels!  Still undecided on the firing arcs