Hexmeister (CC0) [Boardgame]

[alectronic]

Hexmeister is a game inpired by Hex and Sequence. It takes the objective and mechanic of each game and mix it in one. At the unlikely chance you have played both, you can probably get away by not reading the instructions.

Rules

Objective

The goal of the game is to connect opposite sides of the board with consecutive pieces like a chain before the other players.

Set Up

You will need:

• The board
• A set of two decks of English playing cards
• A ton of red, green and blue colored pieces

Players/Teams

The game can be played from 2 to 3 teams. The teams consist of a single player up to 3 players depending on the total amount of teams.

• 1 Teams: Go look for someone to play with.
• 2 Teams: 1-3 players.
• 3 Teams: 1-2 players.

Each team is assigned a color or your can wait on this decision to arrange players around the board in their corresponding turn order.

The available team and player arrangements are the following:

• Two Teams
  • 1v1
  • 2v2
  • 3v3
• Three Teams
  • 1v1v1
  • 2v2v2

Note:

Playing 1v2 and like a 2v2 with one player playing for themselves and the missing player is not encouraged as the lone player has an advantage over the duo as they can effectively see two hands at the same time. This concept also goes for other equivalent situations like 1v3, 1v2v2, 2v3, etc … Alternatively you can play like this as a handicap agreement.

Turn Order

First it is needed to set the order of the teams, you can decide this however you like. If the teams are bigger than a single player then each team decided their own player order. The global player order goes from the first player from the first team to the first player of the next team until there are no more teams left, then we repeat with the second player of each team until there are no more players left.

Drawing Hands

After arranging the teams each player should draw cards to their hands from a shuffled set of two English playing cards deck(jokers included). These cards will allow each player to place pieces in the corresponding coordinate of their cards. These coordinates are the value and suit of the cards themselves and every player must place only one piece per turn. Since there are two of each identical card there are two coordinates for each unique card, this means that one can choose between the two coordinates available on the board when playing cards. The amount of hand cards is decided by the amount of total players participating in the game.

• 2 players: 7 cards
• 3 players: 6 cards
• 4 players: 5 cards
• 6 players: 4 cards

Playing Your Turn

Once every player receives their hand cards the first player picks a card on which they will place a piece on the board. After placing the piece they will discard the card in a pile and draw a new card from the remaining cards on the deck. This will finish their turn passing it to the next player, so on and forth.

Walls and Free For All Hexagons

Gray hexagons do do count towards the piece chain and yellow hexagons count for every team. This means that you do not need to place a piece in yellow hexagons to connect your chain, although you can do so when you win the game to annoy other players.

Winning The Game

The first team that constructs a chain of consecutive pieces from their respective end to the opposite one. If no team if able to do so the game will end in a draw.

Alternative Names

Some of these are corny as hell, Hexmeister sound cool though.

• Be²hexed
• Bee-hexed
• B-Hexed
• Hexa-game
• Hexmeister

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I’m open to any comments, critics and ideas.

I have already made a variant (which was actually the original) that uses the same 11x11 grid arrangement of the original Hex game and with the twist that jokers can remove pieces or place anywhere in the board. This variant is only played 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 with only two teams.

Things that need to be done/improved:

• 3-way coordinate indicator looks cluttered
• Color choice
• Create a logo
• Pick a font
• Decide whether to make wins absolute or implement a point system with rounds.

[Anthony]

Loved playing the game with you on playingcards.io! The game was pretty easy to pick up and learn - it felt very similar to sequence in the way you play, so that made it even easier to play

• As for the name, I like Hexmeister, I think it’s fitting.
• As for color choice, design, font, etc. If you want I can try to play around with it a bit when I get the time. I’m not the greatest graphic designer, but I know my way around Inkscape enough to get something maybe halfway decent. ANy ideas for a logo? I probably can’t do anything that has to do with drawing art (except for tracing out an AI generated image, and fixing up some mistakes and simplifying it to look less AI), but I can maybe do something geometric/abstract.

“Decide whether to make wins absolute or implement a point system with rounds.”

From our 1v1 game, I think the win being absolute was enough - but it may be different with more people. But in all honesty, these type of games I think the players are going to determine whether they want to play per round or just a single game anyways. So basically my suggestion is just keep it simple and let the players decide how they want to score wins, but maybe a small note in the rules about possible scoring options that are available?

[alectronic]

This is the svg of the board. For a platform like playingcards.io I think it is better that the coordinate labels have one direction, I will upload one soon. Come to think of it, if I get to make the game work online (on a platform of some sort), it would be cool that the players could orientate the board as they wish and that the coordinates rotated with them along some other crazy stuff. I also have some ideas for the design of the cards but at the moment it is just day dreaming and I should probably contact an artist for that.

The colors are not the best I just chose default colors on Inkscape. Any theming ideas are welcome, personally I will try to come up with medieval-like colors.

I already have some idea of the logo for the game, I had it done for an old version game with an 11x11 trapezoid shape and where jokers are actually wildcards (to add/remove anywhere).

hexmeister-copy.pdf

The pdf is all messed up, and it does not matter at the moment since I want to use and OFL font similar to the one there and remake the logo.

As for other game mechanic improvements, it could be possible that the board gets choked up quickly and even more so with three teams playing. I have some ideas of re-arranging the hexagons, with the only condition that the board has to have rotational symmetry so that the board is equal for every team.

Anyway, thank you very much for playing the game, I’m glad you enjoyed it.

[Anthony]

Thanks for the files!
Also, this also made me think: If you get into messing around with digital platforms, you might be able to mess around with randomizing the board “slots” - not sure if this is a good or bad idea…but something to think about.

[alectronic]

I purposely put them in clusters so that they are eaiser to find, just like Sequence does. I guess it is still possible to rotate the the grid in 60 degrees and maintain the clusters, and clusters can also swap position between each other.

One thing I really want to try is the 3 team game, the 1v1 game can get crowded fast and the 3 team game will be only worse leading to draws. The solutions on mind are:

• Increasing the cards pers hand
• Once a player plays a six they can place another card in their turn
• Once a player plays a six they add/remove another piece wherever
• Once a player plays a six they can activate yellow hexagons for their team or deactivate other team’s hexagons.
• Sixes could have other powers like seeing opponents hand and swapping a card of choice.

It would be would to test them and assign them to different game modes. And finally decide whether to keep the one game mode or several.