Hexagon puzzle games: every hex grid game we have made
We really love hexagons. It becomes obvious from the first look at our website. Three of our puzzle games have a hexagonal grid even though they are all very different from each other. We thought it would be interesting to put them together in one post and discuss them because “hexagon puzzle game” can mean completely different things, and if you liked one of our hex games it (unfortunately) does not automatically mean you will like the others.
There is no logical reason why we have three hex games in YesPuzzles. We just really like the hexagon shape and find it nice to look at and nice to interact with. Later we noticed one very interesting thing about hexagons - they have less adjacent tiles than the square tiles. A square tile has up to eight neighbours. Some of them touch only with a corner, but they are still adjacent. A hexagon has six neighbours and every one of them touches the full side of the hexagon. It is a bit counterintuitive, because I would expect that more sides or corners means more neighbours. Of course this difference plays a very practical role in all the hex games that we have.
Hex Sense - a hexagonal minesweeper adventure
Hex Sense was our first hexagon game. We wrote about it several times already. You guide a small character called Mochi through a hexagonal field, some tiles on this field hide hazards and the numbers on the open tiles tell you how many hazards are around them. You read the clues and find a safe path for Mochi to reach the Exit. Mochi travels through four chapters so far - forests, caves, a desert and volcano lands and the hazards change with the chapter theme. So instead of bombs you meet things like a deadly plant or a poisonous scorpion.
The most important part for us in creating Hex Sense is that players never have to guess which tile is safe. On a hexagonal board a number on a tile relates to the six adjacent tiles instead of eight. To keep the puzzle fair we added one extra piece of information on the tile: a small chain-link symbol under some numbers, which means the hazards it counts are all sitting next to each other - in adjacent tiles. We wrote more about this in our post about playing hex minesweeper without guessing.
Hex Minesweeper - the same logic without the story
After some time Hex Sense players divided into two groups. One group was asking to add more chapters and gameplay elements to the game, while the other group was asking for the opposite - to simplify Hex Sense. They liked the minesweeper part so much that they did not need the hero, the chapters or any story at all. They just wanted to open a hexagonal minesweeper board and solve it and maybe compete for the best time. So we made Hex Minesweeper, which is the Hex Sense logic with everything else taken away.
Players can pick a difficulty - easy, normal or hard. Easy is 60 tiles with 10 hazards and usually takes less than a minute to solve, normal is 150 tiles with 30 hazards, and hard is 300 tiles with 65 hazards, which will take several minutes of time even for the experienced minesweeper players. The first tap is always safe and every board is generated and then checked that it can be resolved without guessing. When you win, the game shows the fewest taps the board could have been solved in and compares it with your taps, so players can see their efficiency. We still kept Mochi - now he is in the top bar and you can tap him any time to deal a new board.
Clean! - hexagons with no hazards
Clean! color game is also built on a hexagon grid but it is completely different from the Minesweeper games. The goal for the game is to clean the whole board. The player taps a tile, it changes its colour together with the connected neighbours of the same colour. If the player clicks on the red tile, it becomes yellow. If they click on the yellow tile, it becomes green, and if they tap on the green tile, it becomes red again. When three or more adjacent tiles become one color, they disappear.
Same as minesweeper this game can’t be lost by being slow. The only way to lose the game is to leave a single tile or a pair of tiles alone - because two tiles can never become three and therefore can never disappear. And if that happens, the Undo button takes the game back to the last winnable state. A lot of players tell us this is the game they open when they want to relax even though the game itself is not easy at all - for some levels you need to think strategically and predict what your move will do to the board.
Which one to try first
If you like Minesweeper and just want to try it on the hexagonal field, go to Hex Minesweeper. If you want the same logic but with a little bit of journey and fun around it, play Hex Sense. And if you want colours and calm thinking, Clean! is the one.
Of course not everything we make is hexagonal. Catch’n’Merge, Vagabond and our new Halloween Match game have nothing to do with hexagons.
Anyway, this is our small hexagon games collection so far. Tell us in our Discord which of the three you like the most and whether our next game should be hexagonal too.
Written by
Ana