hexodic, as a thing you can hold.

A 37-cell board, 16 mm glass marbles, and a lid that is also the box. Buy it made, or buy the files and print it.

Nothing here is on sale yet

Read that first, because the rest of this page describes real things in real detail and it would be easy to mistake it for a shop that is open.

The board has been designed, engineered for injection moulding and costed. It has not been manufactured. No tool has been cut, no cell has ever been moulded, and no board has been assembled or played. The print-it-yourself files exist as geometry but are not yet a product you could successfully print — see below, where that is set out honestly rather than glossed.

There is no checkout on this page because there is nothing to check out. If you want to know when that changes, the fastest route is the trade page below for shops, or the contact route on the press page for everyone else.

The physical edition

A hexagonal board of 37 cells at 20 mm centres, 14 reserve marbles of 16 mm glass seated in divots around the rim, and a lid that snaps over the whole thing and locks the marbles in place.

The lid is the packaging. There is no carton. The game ships as one unit with the rules folded inside the lid, and the lid carries the same honeycomb and the same moulded wordmark as the board itself, so the closed object is recognisably the product rather than a box with a sticker on it. Nothing is printed or applied anywhere on the board — every mark is moulded in.

Two variants have been engineered:

hexodic SPRING — the mechanical board. Every cell is a three-state push-push mechanism: press a cell and it stays down at one of three heights, so the board’s state is physical and readable by touch. 37 sprung cells, an index plate and a tray inside a sealed shell.

hexodic LITE — the same game with no moving parts. State is carried by a two-sided tile that sits in the cell: no tile is the lowest tier, and each face of a placed tile is one of the two higher tiers. 37 tiles, one per cell. Less than a quarter the thickness of SPRING, half the tooling, and roughly half the parts.

SPRING is the better object. LITE is the one whose economics currently work — that is a real tension and it has not been resolved yet.

The intention is to sell the file set for anyone with a 3D printer. It is not ready, and the specific reasons are worth stating because they are not obvious from looking at an STL:

  • The solids were drafted for a steel tool, not a printer. They carry mould-release draft and clearances tuned to injection-moulding tolerances, which are far tighter than typical FDM dimensional error.
  • SPRING cannot currently be printed at all. Its index plate uses living flexures that bend by design; printed, they bend across the layer lines — the weak axis — and snap. Its cells depend on a sliding fit held to moulding tolerance.
  • LITE is close. The plate and the 37 tiles print fine in principle. The blocker is the lid, whose snap beads are sized against an ABS strain allowable that printed PLA does not share.
  • Nothing board-sized fits a 180 × 180 mm bed. A 220 × 220 machine is the realistic minimum — an Ender 3, a Prusa MK-series or a Bambu P1S/X1C.
  • The documentation that makes a file set a product — orientation, supports, materials, printed-fit tolerances, assembly, and a licence saying what you may do with it — does not exist yet.

Files alone are not a product. When this is released it will be released with all of that, or not at all.

For shops and distributors

Trade terms, wholesale pricing and a purchase order sheet are on the trade page.