Game Finished: Hexcells

 Basically I have discovered a couple of times that I really like doing puzzles with my morning coffee. I have discovered this with chess tactics and also with sokobond (a chemistry puzzle game similar to sokobon puzzles of moving pieces to get a solution). But for various reasons I have kind of forgotten or let this lapse.

Anyways, with Hexcells I rediscovered this fact and have been doing these puzzles with my morning coffee.

So basically in my mini review after I tried this game for the challenge I wrote that the puzzles were on the easy side but that there didn't seem to be a whole lot of them so I wanted to finish the game. So anyways I have been working on it. Basically the puzzles did get more challenging to the extent that like working on one and solving one with my coffee was pretty satisfying.

So overall I will say it was a pretty satisfying puzzle game. I do agree with walker that no guessing is required and that makes it better than minesweeper although I don't seem to be as enthusiastic a supporter of this game as walker. (I didn't read his actual review but he discusses the game somewhat in a review for another puzzle game on buried treasure. The actual hexcells review is on another site.)

Another thing that makes it better than minesweeper is that there are some extra types of clues involved. Basically in the same way as minesweeper if a hex isn't supposed to be colored blue then there will be a number in it stating how many blue cells are adjacent. But in hexcells there are some additional notational clues that indicate how these blue cells are arranged. If the number is in curly braces then the blue cells are all adjacent to each other. If the number is between two dashes then they explicitly aren't all adjacent. If the number is unadorned then it could be either. There is also a clue where a number can appear outside a hex at the head of a line of hexes. (this line can be a vertical column or horizontal or diagonal). The same notational features apply to these clues. That made the puzzles more interesting.

There is one big way that minesweeper is better than hexcells though. This has to do with the fact that the minesweeper puzzles are automatically generated. So any time you want to play one you just open the program and boom a new puzzle. As I mentioned the hexcells game doesn't really have that many puzzles and the first half are pretty easy. That being said, this complaint is very mitigated by the fact that the game is quite cheap. I got it on sale for 19 NT which is something like 60 cents. So you can get some handcrafted puzzles for very little investment.

One minor quibble is that I felt the tutorial puzzle for clue where a number appears at the head of a column, row, or diagonal wasn't very clear. It uses the word line. I didn't know what this meant and spent awhile trying to understand until I finally understood. One confusion I had was I thought line meant the line that defines a hex. Then I also thought it meant the line around the set of hexes, etc etc.

Another minor quibble is that I was quite disappointed with the last puzzle. I had been pretty happy with the second to last puzzle. It had been challenging but I had gotten through it with some elbow grease. I was quite looking forward to the last puzzle but it is just an excuse for the credits. This felt like a pretty big let down.

Anyways, the game is quite cheap and I did have fun with it so this is a definite recommend if you are looking for this kind of logic puzzle.