HexWave

A quick, card-based, area-control strategy boardgame for 2-6 players.

The design of HexWave started as a homework assignment during a particularly heavy snow storm. As I stared out the window, wishing I could be outside building a snowman instead of working on school work, I mulled over the prompt: “Build a game that has randomness and strategy.” The desire to build a snowman was overwhelming, so I chose the theme of building a snowman. Whether this task would be completed individually or as a team was neither here nor there. I simply wanted to make a game about building a snowman with your friends. Now all I had to do was build it.

The term “strategy” always makes me think of grids in games, and I’m particularly fond of hex grids, so the first thing I did was to build an A3-sized hex grid in Photoshop and placed it on a stock image of snow. Next, I had to decide how to mix strategy and randomness. I very briefly considered using dice, but I couldn’t figure out how strategy would play a role with the game that was developing in my mind. I grew up playing Magic: the Gathering, and so I understood that even the most perfectly constructed deck could fall victim to the vicissitude of a particularly unfortunate shuffle. So I was building a card game.

A few days or weeks prior to creating this game, I had been playing a cute party game on the Nintendo Switch with friends called Astro Bears (a game I highly recommend, by the way). This game has you play as a cute little bear who is constantly running on a tiny planet. You can change directions, sprint, and jump, and as you move, you leave a trail behind you. If anyone runs into this trail, they lose the round. The winner is the last bear still running.

I decided to emulate something like this trail-of-destruction in my turn-based boardgame, so the cards became the way you move. I quickly made a number of cards with different movements indicated on them. Arrows would represent a single move, and stars a jump so you could cross other players’ paths without issue. I set the maximum number of moves at four so that a player could not entirely envelop an opponent with a single move, as that feels cheesy and counter to the “strategy” aspect of the game. I’d rather you need to think a few moves ahead than simply die in an instant. I also decided that you must do each of the actions depicted on the cards in order, so if the card showed [arrow, star, arrow], this would mean that you move, then jump, then move again.

I, somewhat randomly, chose to have ten each of 1, 2, 3, and 4 move cards; four move>jump and four jump>move cards; and two move>jump>move cards for a total of 50. I did choose the number 50 so that one could either repurpose a normal deck of playing cards by drawing over it or taping new pictures to them, or perhaps getting a playing card printer to make a custom deck would not be so hard. (We’ll see how that goes.) Why not 52? In case I wanted to add some cards later.

In order to allow some forethought on the players’ parts, I chose a small hand size of three cards. I limited the hand size because I wanted this game to remain as light and fun as possible with the “strategic” aspects playing second fiddle. The more cards you have in hand, the more options you have to ponder, and I wanted to severely limit that. This game was to be about quick decisions, quick mistakes, and quick restarts.

At this point, I was still thinking of the goal of the game being to build a snowman (either in a team or competitively). The goal would be to have the longest path, meaning you had rolled the largest snowball for a body. I pulled out some plastic, colored, 25mm discs to mark the players’ trails along with some wooden meeples and started to try to “make snowmen.” And I quickly gave up on that idea. The idea of jumping a large ball of snow over an area that others had already cleared made next to no sense. How would one jump a snowball? And why would you in the first place? It’s not like rolling it over an already cleared space would destroy it. No, the theme needed to change. Counting tiles at the end of the game was also absolutely no fun. So, instead, I decided that the goal was much simpler: survive. If you’re the last one rolling at the end of the game, you win.

By this time, though, the project was nearly due. This was only a week-long assignment, and I hadn’t exactly started working right away. So I packed up my cards, board, discs and meeples, and headed into class.

This was the game! Done and dusted, right?

No, now it was time for some playtesting!

This is how we started class: by playtesting the games everyone had made that week. It’s could often be a bit of a stochastic debacle, but it gives time for people to at least see what their peers came up with, though rarely gave one time to play more than a few of the games presented each week. During this time, my friend Aleksander came over to play my game, which at the time I was still calling “Snowy Rollers” (please don’t judge, it was never meant to be permanent). We had a great time, but he mentioned that he wished there were a way to jump over two grid spaces as we had already died without the ability to jump more than one trail at a time. I thought that was a great idea, and immediately made four more cards: two copies of doublejump, one move>doublejump, and one doublejump>move. (I also removed one of each basic move card.) I kept this number low as I still wanted the majority of the play to be centered around the knowledge that you can’t get past two lines. Strategically, you still need to think of those as insurmountable obstacles. Only with luck will you survive an encounter with a double line. So the game evolved, and everyone was having fun with it in this iteration.

The one issue that was still irking me at the time was the use of the plastic discs. They simply didn’t lend themselves to quick play or quick cleanup. If you wanted to keep your own color of discs, that increased the amount of time you spent sorting them at the end or beginning of play. I had already laminated the board, so I took the next step and pulled out a pack of dry-erase whiteboard markers and had players mark their paths with those instead. While cleanup still wasn’t perfect, it was much better than the discs, so I stuck with that solution while still trying to figure out what a more permanent solution would be.

I didn’t actually make any more changes to the game for a while, though I kept bringing it to game meetups and taking notes of what play-testers said. The most common issue was that the board was simply too big. It was far too easy for one player to simply avoid interacting with the other players, and that just isn’t fun. At one play session, I drew a boundary around the playmat, limiting it to a 6-grid-spaces-per-side hexagon and let players test that out. The game was improved dramatically. Everyone was forced into interactions with other players within a few rounds, and it led to much higher engagement as well as a deeper desire for strategy. After that, I cut the board down to that new, smaller size.

At the next playtest, I made a couple more changes. First, a tester asked if they could all try playing with five cards in hand instead of only three. While I wanted to keep the game light, I understood the desire for more strategic options, so I let everyone hold five cards. Not seeing any adverse affects on the speed of play, I kept that rule. During this session, I also added two more cards: swap and swap hands. Swap simply let you switch positions with another player, and this dramatically increased the tension when surrounding another player as you didn’t know if that player would simply swap places with you, thus trapping you in a prison of your own making. This also dramatically increased the laughs. The other new card, swap hands, was also well received, but I’m not entirely sure it fit with the themes of the game, so I decided to not keep it in the game at this time.

It was at this time that I decided that I wanted this game to be more than a laminated piece of paper and some markers, so I began thinking in earnest about how to mark the paths easily and what the board should look like in the end.

To be continued!