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The Lost Art of Hexcrawling - Basic
First off, the formatting could be a little bit better - for example, the "Elephant in the room" sidebar should not be placed in a middle of the sentence, especially since it could easily be moved lower, before the "Resource Management" section.
Also, a very minor issue that readers from Europe might have with the formatting, is the text alignment - I assume simple left align is OK for people from US, but in other parts of the world texts tend to be justified, especially if they are placed in two columns. That being said, it's mostly personal preference - and I prefer texts to be justified.
Content review
Not counting the covers and licence, the product has five pages - enough to explain the basic idea behind hexcrawling and to get GM to understand why introducing such mechanic might be a good idea, without the discouragingly large volume of text.
"Travel Time and Sessions" section nicely divides each day of travel into four sections, and provides a way to determine when an encounter might take place with a simple d4 roll.
"Travel Pace" section is very basic - but that is by design, as the purpose of the whole book is to introduce person with zero hexcrawling experience to the idea. I must say, that travelling on foot being equal in the distance travelled to the mounted travel seems weird, but that is due to the large size if each hex (a day's travel worth - so probably about 24-30km/14-20 miles). Again - for a basic assumption, that is OK, but it means that buying horses has absolutely no game effect. The easiest way to change it, would be to use smaller hexes, each being roughly 1/3 of that (so 8-10km/6 miles), or even 1/4 (6km/5 miles) - as moving at the "exploring" pace would still have a visible progress of 1 hex/day, plus then having horses or other mounts could allow to travel 1 hex more and would allow to introduce different speeds for different terrain types more easily.
What is not OK, is there is no distinction as to how a certain terrain types can affect distance travelled - traversing flat grasslands for a day under the presented rules lets the party move the same amount as travelling through the dense forest, a swamp or a mountain range. I'd say the whole point of hexcrawling is to make exploration interesting, and assuming terrain has no impact whatsoever is a letdown.
The "Party Roles" section is more robust, as it gives example of seven roles each character can take for a day of exploration. The major issue I have with those is: out of the seven roles, Navigator and Tracker seem unnecessary divided in two, just to give players more bonuses. By my count, especially in 5e, that is unnecessary, as characters already have enough power, and giving them even more bonuses makes the game too unchallenging. Is it really necessary to have navigator? Unless the party is seeking a specific destination, I'd say no. Does evey expedition need to have quartermaster? Probably yes, but do a adventuring party of four/five PCs? Probably no, especially with the previous mention (in Resource Management section) that managing resources in 5e has (too) many workarounds that make it mostly irrelevant, from easy access to magic creating food and water, to always assuming the characters do have their canteens full (except maybe on a desert). This role would be way more relevant, if the need for hirelings - pack bearers, guides, scouts, etc. - was at least mentioned, but as there is none whatsoever, the quartermaster seems out of place. Especially if forager can take care of scrounging some supplies in a pinch (again, no modifiers for terrain are given, so the system assumes it is as easy to find potable water on the desert, as it is in a jungle).
Chef - here we see some interesting thoughts on the cooking mechanic. Surprised? Yes, me too. Especially the only mechanical effect of the role is irrelevant if noone wanted to pick Motivator role that day.
In general, while picking a role for a day seems interesting, I find the current version of the document lacks any way to actually do things while exploring - no way to tell if events, terrain features and speed of travel has any impact of finding any points of interest or encounters, because PCs are not taking actions during travel - they're taking roles.
Then there's the "Lost" section - pretty standard. It assumes the hexcrawl being a player-known structure, as it references telling the players which hex they are on when they stop being lost, it has default "lsot direction" generator, but instead of just diverging to the left/right, it also allows party to go a little bit backwards left/right. Definitely nice idea, I like it.
In the "Mapping" section we finally get to differentiate between terrain types! But only in DCs for the checks, nothing too crazy - after all, this is the basics.
Finally, the "Encounters" section. It begins with the reaction table, and I was going to point out the reaction table in DMG... but, after double checking, there is none provided in the 5e core. Huh. The one presented here is too simple for my tases, as it has only four options, and it doesn't allow any modifiers for the party leader/speaker Charisma (I'd assume the Navigator role fits that the closest, as it's the navigator that declares the direction of travel). Then again - it's the basics book, that's enough to get the gist of it.
Then a rule for checking if any encounter occurs - this is another formatting issue for me, as this one should be placed before description of CE (Creature Encounters), EE (Environmental Encounters) or PoI (Points of Interest), not after. The table is a d100 roll, again without any terrain based bias, but
At the very end of the section, there are some example encounter tables - very simple, but as this is basics book, that's enough.
What I find really missing, is the example of play. Basically, the author provides the toolbox, with short description for the tools, but does not tell how to use them as a whole hexcrawling system. An example of play (either at the very beginning, or at the end) would round this up very good, while also giving the GM something to base their play on.
To summarize this review, this isn't a bad book, if very simple. It's aimed at the GMs completely new to the hexcrawling in general, and provides some very basic systems to make exploration more interesting. However, no example of play makes this goal harder. Solid 3.5/5 in my opinion.
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