Bringing a healthy dose of strategy to word games, Hexicon is doing something completely new for those of us who enjoy the genre.
I do like word games; I’m just not good at them. I often can’t find the largest word or the best word on the board, but I still like looking for words. In this game, it’s not about making the best words or the biggest words, it’s about controlling territory and capturing tiles.
Hexicon is a multiplayer word game on a hexagonal grid of letters where each player tries to form words that use a bunch of different tiles, then surround tiles. If you surround one tile with enough of your tiles, from a single word or multiple words, you will capture that tile and the tiles around it will reset. Capturing tiles gains you a point, but sometimes your moves can give both players a point – yet is useful for resetting tiles.
You can only use your color once you have claimed it or grey tiles on the map, so resetting becomes a large part of the game. Sometimes, it’s better to do smaller words and reset areas than it is to keep getting large areas of color. I found this to be a very interesting part of the game itself!
Despite being multiplayer, Hexicon allows you to take your turn then wait for your opponent to get back to you – so it’s not done in real time. If you don’t want to take on some real people, you can always face off against bots – of which there are a few different ranks.
From what I played of it at the Big Indie Pitch Digital event, Hexicon is a really interesting and unique take on the word game genre.
The beta for Hexicon is available now on the App Store and Google Play.
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