Last time I was home I walked by a neighborhood garage sale and noticed in a box of old toys a handful of these colored plastic pieces made out of different numbers of hexagons. The ones I saw were green, brown, or blue. They came in varying sizes: 1 hexagon, 2 hexagons, 3 hexagons, and 7 hexagons. I didn't think anything of it at the time but was recently thinking back to that and thought they would have been interesting for gaming. I did some research and found that they are terrain tiles from a game called Heroscape, which I actually vaguely remember TV commercials for awhile back.
As it turns out, using these tiles is fairly common for miniature gaming. They are stack-able and come in a variety of sizes so that you can create sort of tiered, hexagonal hills. I'm thinking these might be an easy way to quickly build variable land shapes for Dystopian Wars or any other wet naval game. Packs of the tiles sell like hotcakes on ebay. It looks like they generally sell for around $50 for a lot of ~300 individual tiles, which is actually a smattering of different pre-made shapes. Most of them seem to include a few 24 hexagon plates, some 7, a bunch of 3, and a bunch of 2 or 1. Generally they also contain a couple colors of tiles. However I've even seen lots of the same numbers of tiles but only in a single size for around $30.
It looks like $50 will cover a Dystopian Wars table pretty effectively.
Has anybody else seen Heroscape tiles used in miniature gaming?
What's the consensus on hexagonal, slightly of cartoonish (for lack of a better word) looking terrain for Dystopian Wars? Would it detract from the game?
