Hare & Hounds: Developing Maudlin Jack Tar's ideas

After uploading the recent blog post that outlined Maudlin Jack Tar's ideas for developing the Hare & Hounds board, I have spent some time thinking about ways in which I could take them forward.

My first thoughts were to create a simple spreadsheet that would randomly determine which small squares in each of the larger squares would contain hills, woods, impassable hills, and built-up areas. I created a simple Excel spreadsheet that looked like this:

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I then typed the following instruction in each of the cells:

RANDOMBETWEEN(0,9)

This generated a random number between 0 and 9 in each cell, thus:

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Using Maudlin Jack Tar's terrain matrix ...

... and the simple rules that:

• Hills are randomly placed first.
• Woods are then randomly placed. (N.B. any wood that is allocated to the same small square in one of the larger squares as a hill negates the placing of both types of terrain in that small square.)
• Hills are then determined to be passable or impassable. This is done using random numbers greater than 5 (i.e. 6 or greater) = impassable hill.
• Built-up areas are then randomly placed in large squares that do not already contain a city or town. (N.B. Any built-up area that is allocated to a small square that already contains a hill or wood is ignored and not placed on the board.)

The resulting version of the Hare & Hounds board looked like this:

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I then removed any of the connectors between large squares that terminated in a small square that contained an impassable hill. (There were actually only two.) The resulting Hare & Hounds board looked like this:

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The left-hand country looks like this ...

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...and the right-hand country looks like this:

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As more time become available over the next few days, I hope to look at further ways in which this concept could be developed.