@~Something different ...
                           Hexxagon
                Reviewed by James Judge on a 486sx

                    (On SynTax Disk 825)
    System requirements 286, VGA and 640K base RAM (475 free)
           Supports mouse and soundcard (Soundblaster)

Ah, space. What better place to play a strategy game where you
must alter the state of objects to take over a honeycomb shaped
board before your opponent (human or computer) does.

Well, if you agree with that, Hexxagon will be right up your
street. If any of you know a game called Atoms that didn't do too
well on the ST, you will be familiar with the basic idea of the
game.

You are presented with a purple board (no, this game has got
NOTHING to do with Prince) on which there are a few gems (you) and
a few blobs of chrome (your opponent). The board is split in
hexagonal segments in which you can place your gems. You move your
gems around the board in two ways. The first is moving them to one
adjacent segment where the original gem will stay in place and a
new gem will be created in the selected segment. The other way is
to move a gem two segments where they will just 'flip' across,
leaving the first segment and arriving at the selected one. For
this move you gain manoeuvrability but lose the creation process.

Moving your gems around the board is all well and good, but sooner
or later you will want to do something else other than moving a
gem from A to B and then back again. Yes indeed, you will want to
go and do a bit of board conquering.  To do this you must fulfil
one of two requirements.

(1) Have more pieces than your opponent after all segments of the
board are filled.

(2) Completely smash the opponent into submission where he has no
place to go and you have converted all of his pieces, trodden them
into the ground and then spat on them.

To convert the opponents pieces you must place a gem beside the
piece(s) and the gem will exude a blue funnel that, upon touching
the piece(s), will turn them from blobs of chrome to gems.

So far it seems simple enough and, in reality, it is. The fun
starts when you turn up the difficulty level (there are three of
'em) or invite a friend round to have a game or ten. You can make
the game as complex as you want by employing a host of different
strategies and weighing up the many moves that can confront you.

Finally there is an option to create your own board which you can
then save to disk.

This is fine, but what are the graphics and sound like? We all
have huge multi-meg, SVGA machines these days that can perform
floating point calculations while it is displaying a screen-saver
and whistling Yankee Doodle Dandee so what can we get from this
game? Well, presentation is crisp and clear with the snazzy purple

board and nicely animated and coloured pieces. The sound is good
to with different effects for each move and it all runs an a 286!

In all the game is a simple but good one that will have most
players dipping in and out of it during the odd moment of boredom.
It can run through Windows (it even has its own icon provided!)
so you can install it at work too, if you don't think the boss is
watching that is!

The only gripe is the registration fee. $25 (including P&P)is a
tad OTT if you ask me. If it was $15 (including P&P) I would have
considered registering my copy, but as it is, I don't think I
will. For those of you who don't mind forking out $25 you will
receive the updated version of Hexxagon as well as Hexxagon II
with its different board, better animation and sounds and
all-over revamp.

Good for the odd five minutes.

                              - o -