Continental Game Board Concept

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. As usual, I'm not a social-media person, so it requires a lot of self-bum-kicking to get me out typing on the screen.

But!

I'm not idle. No no. There is quite some stuff happening on the background.

Anyway, I digress. Let's get to the point of this post:

I’m working on a game concept, and I’ve been thinking more specifically about the game board. The game board has to be a map, however, I want to have great flexibility in its “continental” arrangement. Whereas hex-tiles are quite useful in for that, allowing to create many shapes, they come with a down side: the grid is a lot harder to read for users with the Y axis in diagonal and see-saw between rows.

So I toyed around with a concept: how about using irregular polygons on a square-tiled board? Would that work?

Here is a concept I worked with to test the idea:

So we have 6 irregular polygons which can be arranged in random locations on the map, and there be rotated in whichever way is more fitting.

My first impressions with this test are not terrible, but not completely mind blown either.

There is a limit to the deviation of the tile shape from the actual square space, beyond which it would become impractical to place the tile among its neighbors. Measuring this deviation may be difficult.

The other aspect I cam to consider while placing these around is the angles of the polygons. I could probably work with a limited set of standard angles, such as +30 and -30, +60 and -60 degrees etc. so that these would fit more naturally with one another and create an uninterrupted area between spaces.

Finally a difficult point would be assessing where the tile belongs, the more elongated ones overlapping multiple spaces more ambiguously would cause a problem. This could be remedied perhaps with some “center” or a point on the tile that determines the “regulatory” location of the tile.