The honeycomb effect

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Dr Wood is churning them out at a visibly pace! ‘Tribe’ was interesting but takes patience and a bunch of like-minded souls to play. ‘Kogworks’ is quick to set-up and a fun challenge, even with a complete stranger. The all-new ‘Six’ is innovative and another rapid-play innovation from a game developer I’ve come to respect greatly. If packaging matters in retailing games, Dr Wood is experimenting furiously. From the original and simple rectangular ‘Kaleidoscope’, to their mini-puzzlets, the large format ‘Kingdom Quest’ (early generation Tribe engine) and ‘Akkumulate’(barely passable), to the uniquely triangular ‘Kogworks’, and now this curiously square ‘Six’!
Twenty-two red and black hexagonal tiles and a black cloth bag to store them in! That’s it. No game board. No dice! Players go alternately. I place my black tile on the table. You place your red tile against any of the six sides. And so on. The winner is the first to arrange six in a row — either in a straight line, or in a triangle, or in a circle. My first game ended lamely and within eight to ten moves. Clearly, I hadn’t got the hang of the numerous play options that rapidly unfold. The next game was absorbing. Neha played distractedly, busy planning a day with the new man in her life before he heads out of town on an internship. One would have thought that should have made it easier for me to force a quick win. It didn’t! There were multiple feints. Deft shifts from attempted straight line wins, to triangular set-ups, opponent block moves and desperate encirclement tactics. She was arguing whether he’d count time with her at her diabetologist appointment, as ‘time together’, when I finally won! It was a pathetic straight line victory, with no devious guile at all. She was distracted, and the win was without soul!
‘Six’ has interesting rules to eliminate any first mover advantage. In the event that all 22 tiles are played without a result, round two allows fascinating remove-and-pace moves. Capture and removal of isolated tiles throws up an entirely new gamut of possibilities. I’ll have to wait for Neha’s man to begin his internship in a distant geography, to explore ‘Six’ fully, in her usually engaged manner!

The author may be contacted at arup_kavan@yahoo.com [2]