Boilerplate
Hexodic is a mobile-first abstract strategy game on a 37-cell hexagonal board — one piece type, fully deterministic rules, and games of about five to six minutes. Its measured decision depth exceeds the chess-class branching-factor target it was designed against, and its learning bot, CL3O, improves through a transparent loop driven by real human play: a daily self-play search proposes new weights, and a version is served only if a statistical test accepts it as stronger and it answers the games humans won against the served version.
Fact sheet
Status labels, generated from the one vocabulary this site uses: SHIPPED (live today — you can verify it by playing); IN-FLIGHT (built and on the way, not public yet); VISION (not shipped — a direction we will always label as such); HISTORICAL (was true once and has been superseded; kept so the record is not rewritten).
| Fact | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Abstract strategy (perfect information, zero luck) | — |
| Board | 37 cells, radius-3 hexagon; one piece type, three tiers | SHIPPED |
| Session length | ~5–6 minutes (measured mean 5.98) | SHIPPED (measured) |
| Branching factor | 910 / 1,021 / 666 at half-moves 5 / 10 / 20 (target ≥35) | SHIPPED (measured) |
| Draw rate / first-player win | 0.5% / 47.38% | SHIPPED (measured) |
| Bots | 7 difficulty tiers, on-device | SHIPPED |
| Platform | iOS — live on the App Store (v1.0.1, free); the browser version was retired on 2026-10-17 | SHIPPED |
| Price | Free to play with occasional interstitial ads between games; one optional one-time Premium purchase removes ads; no pay-to-win | IN-FLIGHT (listing locked) |
| Online play | Not live: the browser version, which carried invited online play, was retired on 2026-10-17; online ranked play is not promised | HISTORICAL |
| Play-to-train bot loop | Live mechanism (classical evolution + statistical promotion gate) | SHIPPED |
| Full reveal | September 17, 2026 | IN-FLIGHT |
| National bots | Vision — country-trained bots representing their players | VISION |
The three story angles
- The game itself — a deterministic hex-grid abstract with chess-class measured depth in five-minute sessions: the “depth without homework” story.
- Play-to-train — the game whose players are literally the selection pressure on its bots: a transparent, statistical evolution loop, not a neural-net data grab. Full mechanism on play-to-train.
- National bots (vision) — where it’s headed: bots trained by their own countries’ players, representing them. This one is explicitly a roadmap story — we’ll say so on record, every time.
Accuracy notes for journalists
We’d rather lose a headline than ship a false one, so: Hexodic’s bot loop is not deep learning — call it an evolution loop or a bot tournament, not a neural network. National bots have not shipped — present-tense phrasing would be wrong. The iOS app is on the App Store (v1.0.1, free) — “download now” is accurate for iPhone and iPad, but Android has no store listing, so do not extend it there. The iOS app contains no gambling or wagering of any kind. If you catch this site ahead of reality anywhere, tell us — the claim gets fixed, fast.
Key art
Reveal key art, direct from source: one real, engine-verified board position — one move from a Network win, reachable through actual play, not composed for the picture. Master and square crops below; the full set is in the downloadable pack.
Master, 3:2 (3000×2000) — PNG · SVG · no-text PNG · no-text SVG
Square, 1:1 (2000×2000) — PNG · SVG · no-text PNG · no-text SVG
Also in the pack: wide, 16:9 (2560×1440) — PNG · SVG · no-text PNG · no-text SVG; tall, 9:16 (1080×1920) — PNG · SVG · no-text PNG · no-text SVG; and the pre-reveal teaser crop, 3:2, fogged — PNG · SVG.
Assets & contact
The downloadable press kit has the full key art set (9 PNG, 9 SVG — five crops, texted and no-text, plus the teaser) and a plain-text fact sheet. Wordmark and screenshots beyond the key art are available on request. Media contact runs through the Hexodic support site.