I make maps for my games. And sometimes, I just make maps because I like them. Hex Kit is a tool I use for that, because it’s so easy to get started! Now, I’ve not tried any other software, so I daresay Wonderdraft or some other mapper is better, but if you’re drawing hex tile maps, at a relatively large scale, you can do something easy very quickly indeed.
Here’s a small starmap I made for a SWN game I was playing in. I think I spent about as long looking up the existing names as I did drawing it.
It’s very simple, Cecil has drawn a lot of very pretty tiles, and the software will allow you to drop them in different layers on top of each other on a map. You can also rotate them and add captions, and produce player and GM variants. If there’s a tile of it, you can draw it.
Done.
The Fantasyland tileset
Now I’m not entirely sure which tileset is which any more but this one looks like nearly-entirely Fantasyland. There may be some Travelling through Dangerous Scenery.
I LOVE DRAWING ISLANDS.
This one I think is definitely a blend of multiple tilesets. So one disadvantage if you don’t buy in a pack, you’re not going to make something exactly like these. Although you will hopefully do much better…
The slow parts of Hex Kit come with doing coastlines and rivers. Those aren’t randomly generated, there’s a bunch of tiles of different boundaries, and you pick each one you want and rotate it by hand. I’m pretty sure that’s when something more sophisticated is better.
On the other hand, you don’t have to draw in every coastline. Well, look at both and decide for yourself.
And for treasure maps, there’s Black Spot.
The very first image is “Spaceland Part One; Space”. CONE doesn’t do short names. Also note the flat-topped hexes. Turns out there’s some tabs-vs-spaces war on points or flats up on hex maps. I can’t say I notice a difference myself.