Three-sentence Hexes

Editing the Antarctic Adventure Anthology has precipitated many ideas about how to steer the future of the project. Earlier this year, I wrote a mild polemic against overly dense hex stocking. I wrote it because I genuinely prefer maps with empty hexes, but the argument matters to me because "completing" the Antarctica map is only really achievable if there are empty hexes. After a year-long jam, we have just shy of 2,500 PoIs, so keying every hex at this rate would take 44 years. Thankfully, most participants were already incorporating unkeyed hexes -- regions of the map designated as "finished" or "playable" cover 10,000 hexes1 -- only a decade to go! Blue points are keyed hexes as of 9/4/26. As jam coordinator/initiator I'm trying to figure out ways to shrink the problem of 110,000 empty hexes into something achievable. Decreased stocking density rapidly reduces the size of the task, but there is a limit to how sparse you can go. (I personally favor 1-in-11 on average, aiming for a…