Hex — connect your two sides
Each player owns two opposite sides of a diamond of hexagons, and tries to join them with a chain of their own colour. One chain always blocks the other, so the game can never be drawn.
From Hex, a game by Piet Hein, found again by John Nash.
What it shows a designer
Every move is both an attack and a defence, because the same chain that connects one player blocks the other. It shows how a geometric fact can rule out draws, and how the swap rule balances first-player advantage.
Credits
- Made by
- Piet Hein, 1942; found again independently by John Nash, 1947–49
- This version
- A 5 by 5 board, with the swap rule
- Sources
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)
trmph.com/hexwiki/Rules.html
What you need
- paper with a 5 by 5 diamond of hexagons drawn on it
- two pens of different colours
How to play
- The board. Draw a diamond of hexagons, five along each side. Each player owns a pair of opposite sides.
- A move. Take turns colouring one empty hexagon. A coloured hexagon never changes.
- The swap. After the first move, the second player may take that hexagon as their own instead of moving, so the first player has no reason to start in the strongest place.
- Win. The first to join their two sides with an unbroken chain of their own hexagons wins. Neighbours share an edge.
After playing, talk about
- Why can nobody draw?
- Did you attack or defend more? Is there a difference in Hex?
- What did the swap rule do to the first move?
Its blocks
How its blocks were checked against BoardGameGeek
- Hex: partly checkable, nothing against it. indirect via board: not checkable. mostly skill: not checkable. full information: not checkable. abstract: not checkable. take turns: not checkable.
In boardgameBuilder, Open game puts its blocks on the canvas. Changed, the same file can come back here from Propose a game.