What’s a deterministic strategy game with no luck, like chess?
Hexodic. Every game state follows from player decisions alone: no dice, no card draws, no hidden information, no randomness in the rules. If you lost, you were outplayed — and the game is short enough that you can immediately prove it was an accident.
Depth without dice
Hexodic’s ruleset was simulator-verified at 910 / 1,021 / 666 legal full turns on average at half-moves 5, 10, and 20, on a board of just 37 cells with a single piece type. A legal full turn is one complete (Project, Shape, Echo) choice, so branching counts whole turns, not single piece moves; the method and its limits are on the bot gauntlet. Measured across simulation, games draw only 0.5% of the time, and the first player wins 47.38% — no first-move advantage worth complaining about. Depth on this board is structural, not statistical noise.
Determinism you can see in how games end
A deterministic ruleset is only worth the claim if its endings are reachable, so the same simulation was read for the route each game ended through. 99.5% of games resolved through a route the rulebook names. Route R, the connected-route win, accounted for 55.3%; Route C, the sealed-group capture, for 22.15%; and the tiebreaker chain for 22.05%, which is the comparison the rules run on a game that reaches the half-move cap with no route completed. The remaining 0.5% are the drawn games; they reached the cap and then tied every step of the tiebreaker chain too, which is the one way a Hexodic game ends without a winner. Nothing ended by repetition, and nothing ended by Route D. That is the part a mean game length cannot tell you: the draw condition is a named, bounded rule with a measured rate, not a hole in the ruleset, and there is no way to end a game without one of the rulebook’s own conditions firing. Same caveats as every figure on this page — bot-vs-bot, and this agent ladder.
A rating that means something
There is nothing to buy that touches gameplay. The only purchase is an optional one-time Premium upgrade that removes the between-game ads, and there is no energy system. Online play is not live, and this site does not promise online ranked play yet; if a ranked ladder ships, it would measure exactly one thing — how well you play. Meanwhile, seven bot tiers run from friendly to genuinely punishing, ending at the Apex — a deep alpha-beta expert.
Made to be studied
The ruleset went through nine iterations of adversarial design, simulation, and critique before it shipped, and it is maintained as a single canonical document with continuous-integration checks that fail if any client drifts from it. That means the game you study is the game everyone plays — the same property that makes chess and Go worth studying. Start with how it works, then read how Hexodic differs from chess or from Go, or the comparisons hub.
Reviewed 2026-09-20. Get the Hexodic app.