Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Neuroshima Hex has known three previous editions, each ultimately widening the pool of available factions and improving on what was already a very good design. Now, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, publisher Portal Games has rebooted the line again. Blessed are we who live to see such times. Finally, you can own a base set of Neuroshima Hex with a box that doesn’t look like absolute butt. Aesthetics was never the point of all this, but goodness.
Inside that box, you’ll find four factions’ worth of tiles with which to play this marvelous game. Do the tiles look better? Listen, there are limits to what you can manage when designing a game that has to convey a large amount of information in a small amount of space. Do the tiles look good? No. Do they look bad? No! They’re a miracle of legibility. Don’t worry about it.
The basic idea is pretty straightforward: on your turn, you draw up to three tiles, discard one, and then play, discard, or save the others. Your tiles are a mix of Troops that attack and hinder your opponent, Modules that provide buffs and debuffs to the pieces on the board, and Actions, which can do all variety of things depending on the faction. As the game progresses, the board gets clogged up with player Troops and Modules, but it won’t be long before a Battle starts.
The Battles are both Neuroshima Hex at its best and Neuroshima Hex at its fiddliest. You’ll know whether or not this is a game for you within thirty seconds of starting your first Battle. Most Troops have some combination of ranged and melee attacks, which shoot off in various directions, and an initiative value between 0 and 3. Battles resolve one initiative level at a time, with everyone at the current level doing damage simultaneously. This means that each battle involves a lot of painstaking, meticulous board combing, as you make sure that all modifiers are accounted for and that nary a unit gets missed. It’s fussy enough to make Neuroshima Hex a strong entry in the “This is better as a computer game” category, but it’s not so fussy as to make the game feel unmanageable.
I would typically find that kind of thing onerous, but the interplay of initiatives, the specificity of everything, is crucial to the game’s texture. If you set up a quicker unit so that it’s taking out my slow bruiser before my bruiser has a chance to pop off, that can be a major blow to my plans. Unravelling the chain of events your opponent has painstakingly set up is one of Neuroshima Hex’s great joys, and one of its great frustrations. Don’t worry, you’ll get your shots in too.
I adore Neuroshima Hex, but I am no natural. Any game that requires the math of intentional sacrifice is one that I will at least initially struggle with. Many years ago, I was attempting to teach an ex Magic, and she could not understand why she would want to sacrifice creatures to prevent me from dealing damage to her. Lo these fifteen years later, a greater sense of empathy has found me. If you try to save everybody in Hex, you’re going to lose.
It’s easy to get bogged down in trying to play “perfectly,” but Neuroshima Hex is much too messy of a space to allow for perfection. This is a game of opportunism, of potshots, of “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.” Any fight in which you take two damage and the other guy takes three is a good fight as far as you’re concerned. You can’t be precious. Chuck those little guys into the fire.
Once you settle into that groove, Neuroshima Hex opens up. It is primarily a tactical affair, but you start to get a feel for the larger strategies. The four factions and the scenarios included in the box give you plenty to chew on, but the real joy of Hex comes with exploring all of the expansion factions. The first release in the new edition—which is to my eye fully compatible with at least the previous version—is the Wiremen, and they immediately rip the rug out. You cannot fully evaluate Neuroshima Hex without engaging with its expansions, without seeing the incredible breadth of ideas that are made to fit within its six sides. Neuroshima Hex is a game worthy of your time and dedication. It’ll pay you back with so much more than what you put in.
