A real-time strategy board game fought on a living hex battlefield that is different every single time you play. Every coin is a unit. Every hex is a decision.
Chess gave us 64 squares. Go gave us 361 points. HexaWar gives you a battlefield that is never the same twice.
Two players start with castles in opposite corners. Castles mint coins, coins are your army, and the whole map is a race to take the enemy's fortresses before the clock runs out.
Each hex carries a terrain and a height. Darker ground is higher and scores more. Water, rock, forest and mountains block movement and shape the lanes of the battle — so the map you are given decides how the fight has to be fought.
A mid-game board. Stacks of up to ten coins, castles producing in the corners, and the lanes carved by terrain.
Pick a mode, a size, a time limit and a seed. Everything is remembered between sessions.
The rules fit on a postcard. The strategy does not.
Every castle that is standing empty mints one coin per second, up to a cap for the whole match. Your total army is finite, so every coin you spend is a decision.
Coins pile up to ten per hex. You can move a whole stack, split part of it off, or merge with a friendly stack next door.
Take ground one hex at a time, or combine several neighbouring stacks into a single coordinated attack.
Attack an adjacent enemy stack: the bigger side wins and takes the loser's coins. A tie wipes both out. Seize the castles they were defending.
Take every enemy castle, or lead on points when the clock runs out. Points are coins multiplied by the height of the ground they stand on.
Terrain is not scenery. Tesla coils, volcanoes, drifting clouds, teleporters and monsters all change what is safe to do — and most of them punish whoever is winning.
The first coin to step on a coil fires ten bolts at ten different enemy stacks and destroys one coin on each. Coils move to a fresh tile after use, so the map keeps shifting. They never spawn close to a castle — guard yours with a ten-stack parked nearby.
Rare, impassable, and strictly neutral: they spit lava at both players, destroying one coin per rock. On hard, large boards an eruption can throw ten rocks at once.
A blue hunter fights for one side, a red one for the other. They stalk isolated coins, ignore castles, use teleporters — and when the two of them meet they brawl until one dies.
Clouds drift tile to tile and freeze whatever is underneath — you cannot move on, off or through. They chase your biggest stacks.
Step on the blue entry and one second later your stack surfaces at the orange exit across the map. It only opens while the exit is clear.
Waves of planes sweep the board and flatten hexes. The leader gets hit more often, so no lead is ever safe.
Worth zero to minus four, shown in red. A stack standing there scores negatively, so you cross it fast or go around. Impassable swamp blockers split it into lanes.
Beaches only appear next to water and are worth a little. Inland, the darker the hex the higher it is — and at the end of the clock, the dark hexes are what you are fighting for.
Play alone against the machine, hand a controller to a friend on the same screen, or take a match online against another player for real stakes.
You against a 100-level opponent. Its reaction time slows on low levels and sharpens to a tenth of a second at the top, and it defends its castles instead of throwing coins at you.
Two people, one board. Mouse and keyboard work, and so do two gamepads at once — each player gets their own cursor, so you can literally sit on the same couch and fight.
Put two machines against each other and watch. The best way to learn how the AI opens, when it defends, and why it suddenly abandons a castle.
Log in once and the lobby shows every open match: the map, the size, the level of the player's computer, and the stake. Join one, both sides press Ready, and the stakes are held until the match is settled.
Matches are peer to peer, so the board stays responsive. Every result is recorded to your account, every game can be replayed move for move, and your balance follows you from device to device. Free matches settle without moving anything — the result still counts.
Prefer to stay offline? Everything except the lobby works with no connection, and the computer never needs an account.
The map chooser: 40,400 named boards, with difficulty stars, playtime and a preview before you commit.
Not a scripted opponent. It evaluates position, searches ahead, and changes its behaviour the moment it starts losing.
A castle-safety rule keeps the hexes around its fortresses covered. Rush it and you will meet the stack it kept back for exactly that.
The further it falls on points, the more it relaxes its defence and the harder it pushes your castles and the diamonds.
Winning a trade is an absolute priority: it attacks with the smallest force that still wins, and refuses ties and losing attacks.
The AI runs in a background thread, so the board keeps animating smoothly even on a 100×100 map.
Hard maps add volcanoes, monsters and bombers. The AI accounts for all of them.
Hand-named campaigns from a ten-minute skirmish to a five-hour war — or type any number and get a brand-new, fair, playable world. Share the seed with a friend and you are fighting on the identical battlefield.
Non-square boards such as 5×10 or 30×15 are supported too. Every generated map guarantees a path between all castles, so a seed can never hand someone an unwinnable board.
There are no audio files. The music is composed and synthesised live in your browser from the map's seed — so a map always sounds the same, and two maps never sound alike.
The seed chooses the key, one of fourteen scales, the tempo, a chord loop and a melody motif. Share a seed and you share the tune.
Pads, sung voices, bass, drone, plucked sequence, glass ticks, metal strikes, bells and wind — each with its own fader, mute and reverb send.
The hotter the match, the brighter it gets, with a heartbeat under the bass in the final push.
Sound effects are synthesised too — no downloads, no waiting, and it all runs offline.
Drag the strip, or open any shot full size.
Tesla coils: ten bolts, ten stacks
An eruption, aimed at both armies
The blue and red hunters
Bombers go after whoever is ahead
A cloud locks the tiles underneath
Entry, exit, one second apartA real-time board, mid-fight
Swamp scores against youThe catalogue, with difficulty starsThe demo is the real game with ten maps unlocked — every mode, every hazard, the full AI. Enough to know whether this is your kind of war.
HexaWarDemo-Setup.msi
The full game opens all 40,400 maps, seeds, random boards and every mode, and it keeps updating itself.
The full game with automatic updates, cloud-friendly saves and the usual Steam conveniences.
Open SteamStore links are placeholders until the pages go live.