Overview

Monster Hex is an area majority game played on a hexagonal board. Each player takes a stack of 🔟 monsters for their chosen Faction and place them in turn around Magic Stones to capture them.

Game Board

There are 3 boards for different player counts. Each board consists of a certain number of hexes: either empty ones where monster tiles can be placed, or the ones containing Magic Stones. The hexes marked with a purple Magic Hexagon are starting hexes.

There are two types of Magic Stones on the board:

• Small Stones worth 1 point to the player who captures it.
• Large Stones that award varying amount of points to the first and second place during capture, and also score bonuses to specific player Factions.

Tiles

Each monster of a given Faction is represented by a hexagonal tile, each side of which has different number of dots representing the monster power in the corresponding direction (the power ranges from 1️⃣ to 5️⃣). Each monster also has a rank printed on it, with S being the strongest rank, and C being the weakest.

In the base game, each Faction has identical composition of monster tiles, varying only visually.

Setup

During setup, each player fills their hand from the stack of their Faction tiles. The hand size if 4 if it's a 4-player game, and 3 otherwise.

Play Sequence

The game takes a fixed number of rounds depending on the board it's being played at:

• 👤4players board ➡ 8️⃣ rounds
• 👤3players board ➡ 🔟 rounds
• 👤2players board ➡ 9️⃣ rounds

Each round consists of player taking turns placing tiles from the hand onto the board. After everyone have placed their tiles, they refill their hands to the maximum size and move on to the next round.

Placing Tiles

The first monster tile of the game must be placed on one of the starting hexes marked with the purple Magic Hexagon. After that, each new tile must be placed so that its power at one of the edges matches power of a monster in a neighboring hex. The Factions of the monsters involved doesn't matter, and it's not necessary for powers on the other sides to be matched.

In case there is no valid place for any of the monsters in player's hand, they can place a tile on any unoccupied starting hex. If there is no valid staring hexes either, the tile can be placed arbitrarily.

Capturing Stones

Immediately after a Magic Stone becomes completely surrounded, a capture check is performed as follows:

• ⭐Players total up the powers of their monster sides facing the Stone.
• ⭐The total powers are compared to determine first and second places
• ⭐No one gets the first place if there's a tie for the most power. Only when capturing a Small Stone, the ties are disambiguated using the ranks of the monsters involved
• ⭐No one gets the second place if there's a tie for the second most power
• ⭐The first place player, if any, scores number of points equal to any of the values printed on the Stone
• ⭐The second place player, if any, scores number of points equal to one of the remaining values
• ⭐If a player picks a value of the same color as their faction, that player scores additional 2️⃣ points.

Game End

The game ends when the board is completely filled with tiles. The player with the highest total score wins the game. If tied, the player who ranked first when capturing the Large Stone with value 7️⃣ wins.

Game Variants

Shared faction

👤2players game can be played on the 👤3players board using an extra faction shared between players. Each round one of the players holds a tile of that extra faction that they must play at the end of the round, observing the usual tile placement rules.