HexWar

I've been meaning to review HexWar by GrogSoft for a while now. Partly I haven't because I've been distracted by other things, like cases, but partly because I find explaining how the game works a little difficult. But I have decided to force myself to do it. I hope I do it well. If not, complain loudly!

Hexwar is a battle-for-territory game in the style of Risk. Several armies fight to control the world, a series of connected hexagonal territories. Each player starts out with control of a portion of the territories, with their army units spread throughout the various territories. At the beginning of each turn, one additional army unit is allocated for each square your army controls. You can distribute those units in any manner you please amongst the territories you control. Once you've distributed the armies, you use them to attack neighboring territories controlled by other players. The main factors that determine who wins the battle are the number of army units in each territory and the type of terrain. Mountainous territories are stronger than normal territories and require more units to capture.

After battling over as many territories as you wish to (or have the manpower to fight over), you can transfer army units among territories that touch. Once that is done, your enemies get their chance to attack. Turns proceed in this manner until one player has control over every territory on the board. That player is the winner, and dictator of the whole world.

In the registered version you can configure the game a bit using system or game specific preferences (no game preferences are available in unregistered versions). The system preferences allow you to toggle game sounds, pick a unit transfer speed (so if you always transfer all units, you can do this faster), and chose the pattern for your human player (it's a checkerboard by default). The game preferences screen allows you to toggle the "AI hates human" option (on by default) in case you want an easier game, determine what percentage of the game board will be mountainous and what percentage water (unuseable territory), select the number of AI players (two by default), and select the game size. Hexwar supports four game board sizes - small (6x5, the default), medium (12x10), large (16x20), and huge (22x20). The number of starting armies is proportional to the size of the map, and the larger boards take much longer to play.

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