I have been playing Hexic since the age of 15. That's 9 solid years of off-and-on enthusiasm for this devious game that has always bested me. But no more. Last night at 10:59 p.m. I created a cluster of 3 black pearls and officially WON a game of Hexic. This is such an insignificant achievement in the grander scheme of things, but considering that it has taken me 9 years, I simply had to blog about it.
Hexic is a spectacularly straigthforward game, very like Bejeweled. All you have to do is rotate the colored hexagon pieces on your screen so that you make clusters of three like-colored pieces and they are replaced by new pieces. However, the added layer of game play comes from the fact that if you can arrange six hexagons of the same color around one piece, that center hexagon will turn into a "starflower." But it doesn't stop there. If you can successfully make six starflowers and then arrange them in that same pattern around one hexagon, you will create a "black pearl." And unlike other games like Bejeweled that just go on forever until you either run out of time or can no longer make a valid combination, Hexic actually has an endgame. If you make a cluster of 3 black pearls (or for the more ambitious, an arrangement of six pearls), you win. The game just ends. And that ending is what I have been seeking for so long.
Now I am 100% certain that there are plenty of Hexic players (possibly some among you who are reading this post) who are mocking me right now for taking so long to do this. I'm sure a basic understanding of spatial reasoning and judicious hexagon-wrangling would help anyone achieve this goal in no time at all. But somehow that has always eluded me. I have always been on the verge of winning when suddenly an unfortunate move will make my starflowers pieces combine with each other and disappear, leaving me with the arduous task of making more starflowers in a futile attempt to get to that damn black pearl. Or a bomb will appear and no matter what I can do, I simply can't get it close enough to two other like-colored pieces before it explodes and destroys my game. But yesterday was finally my day. I was making starflowers left and right, they all went exactly where I needed them to go, the black pearls were created with surprising ease, and when I made the third pearl, it was exactly next to the other two so that I didn't even have to do any work to create a cluster of pearls. It was perfect.
There are many web games out there that people love, which are vastly more complex or interesting. But just as people used to (and still do) laud Tetris as a marvel in the field of computer games, Hexic is easily my pick for a simple and utterly conniving game that can take up hours, days, weeks (and in my case, years) of your life. Now that I have finally defeated it, I don't know if I will ever really play it with as much enthusiasm. But I do know that when I play it again, I won't scream in frustration if a bomb explodes before I've made a third black pearl.
Hexic is a spectacularly straigthforward game, very like Bejeweled. All you have to do is rotate the colored hexagon pieces on your screen so that you make clusters of three like-colored pieces and they are replaced by new pieces. However, the added layer of game play comes from the fact that if you can arrange six hexagons of the same color around one piece, that center hexagon will turn into a "starflower." But it doesn't stop there. If you can successfully make six starflowers and then arrange them in that same pattern around one hexagon, you will create a "black pearl." And unlike other games like Bejeweled that just go on forever until you either run out of time or can no longer make a valid combination, Hexic actually has an endgame. If you make a cluster of 3 black pearls (or for the more ambitious, an arrangement of six pearls), you win. The game just ends. And that ending is what I have been seeking for so long.
Now I am 100% certain that there are plenty of Hexic players (possibly some among you who are reading this post) who are mocking me right now for taking so long to do this. I'm sure a basic understanding of spatial reasoning and judicious hexagon-wrangling would help anyone achieve this goal in no time at all. But somehow that has always eluded me. I have always been on the verge of winning when suddenly an unfortunate move will make my starflowers pieces combine with each other and disappear, leaving me with the arduous task of making more starflowers in a futile attempt to get to that damn black pearl. Or a bomb will appear and no matter what I can do, I simply can't get it close enough to two other like-colored pieces before it explodes and destroys my game. But yesterday was finally my day. I was making starflowers left and right, they all went exactly where I needed them to go, the black pearls were created with surprising ease, and when I made the third pearl, it was exactly next to the other two so that I didn't even have to do any work to create a cluster of pearls. It was perfect.
There are many web games out there that people love, which are vastly more complex or interesting. But just as people used to (and still do) laud Tetris as a marvel in the field of computer games, Hexic is easily my pick for a simple and utterly conniving game that can take up hours, days, weeks (and in my case, years) of your life. Now that I have finally defeated it, I don't know if I will ever really play it with as much enthusiasm. But I do know that when I play it again, I won't scream in frustration if a bomb explodes before I've made a third black pearl.
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