Why do strategy games use hexagonal grids?
Hex-grid strategy games use hexagons for one structural reason: hexes fix the square grid’s oldest bug: diagonals. On a square board, two diagonal neighbors touch at a corner — are they adjacent or not? Every square-grid game has to legislate an answer, and either answer distorts distance.
On a hex grid every one of a cell’s six neighbors is equally adjacent, so distance is honest, connection is unambiguous, and encirclement is a natural tactic instead of a rules patch. That’s why the purest connection and territory games in the genre keep choosing hexes.
Hexagons in the genre, with sources
- Hive plays on hexagonal adjacency with no board at all: its publisher, Gen42 Games, describes the placed pieces as forming the playing area (Gen42 Games, Hive, read 2026-09-15). The head-to-head is on Hexodic vs Hive.
- Hexodic is a radius-3 board of 37 hexes where the cells themselves have height: one stone type, terrain reshaped every turn, encirclement capture, and three simultaneous win conditions. The full rules.
Other hexagonal abstracts exist, including connection games such as Hex and Havannah; this page does not state facts about them because no primary rules source was verified for this review.
What Hexodic adds with elevation
Hexodic’s idea is elevation: every cell carries a tier (its height, low to high), every turn includes a Shape action that reshapes one cell, and a stone is exactly as strong as the ground under it. Combined with three simultaneous win conditions — connection (Network), capture (Takeover), and mobility (Strangle) — the six-direction geometry stops being just adjacency and becomes terrain.
The measured figures behind Hexodic come from simulated games: an average of 910 / 1,021 / 666 legal full turns at half-moves 5 / 10 / 20, and a 0.5% draw rate; method and limits are on the bot gauntlet. How Hexodic differs from chess, Go, Tak, Onitama, and Santorini is on the comparisons hub, and the genre-wide view is on the abstract strategy hub.
Reviewed 2026-09-15. Want to feel what six directions with height plays like? Get the Hexodic app.
Part of the Hexodic comparison hub, which links every side-by-side comparison on this site.