Goodbye Hexes, I'm Flying Over You

Another design journal, another sequel. About a week ago I was 7 or 8 days into working on the Community family of Queen Bee Ambitions. I'd been reading about Drone Congregation Areas, an incredibly weird phenomenon, and thinking about their implications on the game map and structure. I let the idea percolate long enough that I told my friends David and Zak that it was time to move away from the 7 Hex Flower that I'd playtested and maybe move toward a more traditional hexcrawl map. Maybe something more like the size and shape of a Mythic Bastionland realm. I'm probably going to eventually retool how maps work and move from the 7 Hex Flower to a more traditional hex map (but still use something like the bee-sized pillars of exploration for keying different biomes). This should allow for more empty hexes and let encounters drive interactions during exploration 5/7/26 Once I had broken that dam though, I wasn't satisfied and I decided to really revisit some core assumptions about the…