Hex Truchet

Hex Truchet

A two-player tile game about building curves you don't fully control.

Every tile is three arcs across a hexagon. Place one next to another and the arcs connect. Keep going and eventually a chain of arcs closes into a loop — and whoever completes it scores the area it encloses.

The catch: the loops belong to the board, not to you. You spend the whole game laying groundwork that either player might cash in. Placing the tile that finally seals a big loop is worth a lot. Handing your opponent the tile placement that lets them seal it is worth considerably less.

How to play

• You hold 3 tiles. On your turn, pick one, rotate it, and place it.
• Tiles must be placed next to a tile already on the board (unless you switch on Free Placement in the menu).
• Click a tile in your hand to select it, press R to rotate it, then click a highlighted cell to place it. A ghost preview shows exactly where the arcs will land before you commit.
• Whenever your placement closes one or more loops, you score the number of cells each loop encloses.
• The board is 37 cells and the game runs exactly 37 turns. Highest score wins.

Two things worth knowing

Small loops are cheap. Three tight turns meeting at a corner close very easily, and they enclose almost nothing. They're free points, and they're also a trap — you can spend the whole game collecting them and still lose. The scoring rewards the rarer long loops that wrap real territory.

Watch what you're setting up. An open chain of arcs is a loop waiting to happen, and it's waiting for either of you. If you leave one nearly closed on your turn, look at what your opponent is holding first.

Modes

• Hot-seat — two players, one screen.
• Vs Bot — four difficulty levels.
• Replay — step through a finished game move by move.

About the bots

The opponents are pure search — no machine learning anywhere. They rank their options by immediate gain, then simulate the rest of the game forward to see which one actually pays off.

• Random — places legally, otherwise thinks about nothing.
• Easy — always takes the best immediate score. Surprisingly hard to beat if you're being careless.
• Medium — searches ahead, but deliberately plays the merely-greedy move about a third of the time. It plays coherently and then periodically walks into something it should have seen.
• Hard — the same search, looking further ahead, with no handicap at all. It is not trying to be fair to you.

Start on Medium. Easy is not as easy as it sounds.

Controls

Action	Input
Select tile	Click a tile in your hand
Rotate	R
Place	Click a highlighted cell
Back to menu	Esc
Replay: step	← / →
Replay: play / pause	Space

Runs in the browser. Built in Godot 4.