Hexagonal tile woes

[Mr. Fahrenheit]

So I've had this recent interest in board games and haven't been able to find one that I think would suite me perfectly, so one of my friends said to make my own.
The basic premise is you are some sort of rustic explorer party searching for some mythical relic or location, not sure what exactly. As you explore you flip over new tiles from a stack so the map is completely different each time you play it. You then can build buildings and get resources to help you on your search. Something like that I guess, I'm really just jamming together my favorite ideas from other games.

The problem I'm having right now though, is how I should make the hexagonal tiles the game would be played on. There would be somewhere around 5 different types of terrain: river/valley, plains, forest, hills, mountains. Each one has a different viewing radius to let you plan a little ahead if you find a mountain and can see far into the distance. I'd like to have some fairly organic shapes of the different patchworks of terrain types. This makes me want to lean away from the idea of a single tile having a single type of land on it. A single type of land per tile would certainly be easier and flow better with the sight line idea. The other way I see that this can be figured out is if I have each tile have a mix of a few different terrain types on it around the corners so they can be organically wrapped around like Carcassonne. This way would provide me with the organic shapes I want and the possibility to incorporate an idea of building context sensitive buildings depending on what corner of the hex they are built on. The problems with this method is that not every tile would be able to work with each other, as far as I know, which is why I came here.

So Pixelation, is there someway to efficiently tile hexagons with multiple types of terrain on them so you can randomly draw them and play them according to existing tiles?


http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic284398.jpg example of different terrain types on a tile on a different game.

[Tourist]

Your link goes to a thumbnail.  Remove the _mt to get the full sized image.

Gammarauders used hex tiles like this:



A bit ugly, but it meets your requirements.  Each tile is self contained so they can be arranged in any fashion. 


Magic Realm used tiles like this:



Nodes connected by paths.  The full set can be viewed here:
http://www.thewinternet.com/magicrealm/tiles/index.html

Keep in mind that cutting out a large number of hexagonal tiles by hand is not fun. 

Good luck with the game,
Tourist

[questseeker]

The choice between tiles with one land type or one land type per corner or edge is an issue of pure game design, not graphics:

• 1 land type per tile vs up to 6: you could need rules for land type combinations, partial coverage, etc.
• interfaces between land types across different tiles or within a tile.
• 1 tile type per land type vs a subset of several hundred possible land type assignments to vertices or edges.

Graphically, the Wang tile style used in Carcassonne is simple (4 edge types: city, grass, grass with river, grass with road) but the constraint of generic corners has a detrimental effect on land feature shapes (particularly cities). A corner tile system like the one you link to has more edge types (n corner types -> n^2 edge types, minus forbidden ones, plus different edge types with the same corners) but each of these edge types can be customized to look good .