👾 HEX-A-ROW! 👾

About 6-in-a-Line

Five in a row, on a hexagonal board, against an AI that is better than it looks.

Hex-a-Row takes the familiar five-in-a-row idea off the square grid and onto a 91-cell hexagon. That one change matters more than it sounds. Each cell has six neighbours instead of eight, and lines run along three axes rather than four, so the diagonal instincts you built up playing Gomoku or Connect Four quietly stop working. Threats arrive from directions you are not watching.

You can play a friend on the same screen, or take on the computer at three strengths. Easy moves at random. Getting Tricky checks for an immediate win, blocks your immediate win, and otherwise scores candidate cells by the threats they create and deny. Nightmare Mode runs a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning, evaluating whole-board patterns — open fours, split threes and the rest — for both players, and it will punish you for building a threat you cannot finish.

Games are quick, usually a few minutes, and the whole thing runs in the browser with nothing to install.

How to play

1. Pick a mode and, against the computer, a difficulty. Changing either restarts the game.
2. Click any empty hexagon to place a stone. Green plays first.
3. Get five of your stones in an unbroken line along any of the three axes to win. The winning line pulses when you find it.

6-in-a-Line is free to use and runs entirely in your browser. See the other experiments on cffy.in.