Howdy, and welcome to my website!
The idea for this game came from my high school pottery class. A classmate had made a set of chess pieces out of clay, which inspired me to do something similar. I was originally going to make a simple chess set, but that seemed too simple. Thus, I decided to create my own version of chess, with my own rules. The first idea I came up with was actually a circular version of chess-it'd be played on a circular board with a "polar" grid on it. The pieces were mainly the same, with only a few slight alterations, including support for 3 players. However, this felt too "vanilla", because I really hadn't come up with something very special, so I went back to the drawing board. After discussing a bit with a friend, I came up with the idea of a hexagonal game board instead of a circular one. I felt it would add another "dimension" to the game, more than just the two dimensions of chess and checkers. At the same time, it's still easy to play on a table, since it's still a 2D board at it's core.
Just like regular chess, both players take turns moving pieces. However, there are only 5 types of pieces, and they have slightly modified movement patterns. They're explained in more detail on the GitHub repo, but I'll give a general description here. Kings and Queens function the same as in regular chess--they can move 1 or infinite tiles in any direction. HexChess Knights have a similar "jumping" function to regular Knights. Bishops still retain an X shaped movement pattern, which is only slightly modified due to the hexagonal grid. Finally, pawns can move forward, but can only attack horizontally. As with regular chess, the game ends when a king is captured or put in checkmate.