Tiles and Edges

This is the chapter that matters. Everything else in Tesserae is ordinary; the movement is not.

There is no north

A hexagon in Tesserae is pointy-top: it has a vertex at the top and flat edges on the left and right. That has one consequence you have to internalise, because nothing directly above or below a hex is adjacent to it.

There is no north and no south. The six directions are:

        northwest    northeast
                 \  /
           west ——()—— east
                 /  \
        southwest    southeast

Say "north" and the GM will ask whether you mean northeast or northwest. It is not being pedantic — they lead to different tiles, and it will not guess for you.

Every edge is open

A hex has six edges and, unless something says otherwise, you can cross all of them. There are no doors, no keys, and no one-way passages. Backtracking is always legal and costs nothing.

Only three things stop you:

1. There is no tile there. You are at the rim of the region.
2. The terrain is impassable. @Missing file and @Missing file are walls. Not difficult ground — walls. No roll, no rope, no clever idea gets you across, and a GM who lets you try is running it wrong.
3. That specific edge is barred. Rare. A cliff line or an unbridged channel closes one edge while leaving the other five open, and usually the same two tiles are still connected the long way round.

Ground has a cost

Terrain does not block you, it slows you.

Marsh is three times the work of meadow. It is also where several things worth having live.

Buying information

You are not allowed to know what is on a tile before you stand on it — with one exception, and you pay for it with a climb.

@Missing file sits on high ground. Standing on it, you get told plainly what is on all six neighbouring tiles: the terrain, and any creature or discovery each one carries. That is the only licensed spoiler in the game, and it exists because you earned it by going up.

It is not consumed. The view is still there next time.

Coming back

You will re-cross tiles constantly, and that is the intended shape of play rather than a failure to plan.

A revisit is narrated short — remembered, not discovered. What changed stays changed: the creature you killed is gone, the cairn you emptied stays empty. What is permanent stays permanent: @Missing file still runs, @Missing file still has stone in it, @Missing file regrows if you give it time.

Learning which tiles are worth returning to is most of what skill in this game consists of.