Doyu Hexcontrol

This game could have done with some in-game basic instructions on how to play.

I started to play like it was a Hex Logic game (see: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gabysoft.hexlogiczoo)

You CAN click on the same hexagon more than once, just in case you didn't know.

I'm like that too. After all, basic controls such as "use WASD to move" are often worked into the first couple of levels, especially if it gets any more complex than that (such as shooting or one of the many shape/character-shifting platformer games).

I found the "Instructions" button back at the main menu, but it wasn't very obvious.

Because of that, I got kind of frustrated. Suppose it's because I'd rather play some kind of logic puzzle than some kind of strategy game.

Since it's a game without any randomness, one of the 2 players is forced to win should he play perfectly, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game to see what I mean. A software that calculate this shouldn't be so hard to make, it may have been done already, I wonder what the result is.

I remember seeing a game very similar to this a long time ago, but it was played on a square grid with an isometric view, you played by stacking tiles on the squares, and the edge/corner squares were slightly raised to illustrate that they took fewer tiles to "overflow".

Seeing it in a hex-grid form is a nice change.

@zzzzz The fact that the game has a theoretical "perfect play" doesn't mean that much. For larger boards it becomes infeasible to compute every possible sequence of moves by brute force, since the number of such sequences grows roughly exponentially with board size.

In other words, knowing that a solution exists is not the same as being able to compute it.

Well I think it's easy to code what there is to calculate, the biggest one probably need centuries to get the solution though, maybe the smallest requires only some weeks I don't know, I was just saying.

zzzzz with your argument chess should have been perfectly solved already, yet computer engineers work since decades on chess AI.

About this game, I bet the AI on "hard" on a small board the second time I ever played this game. So kinda anticlimactic.

No it shouldn't, like I said, by using bruteforce it can take centuries to solve games which allow many actions each turn.

By the way, in hard on the biggest board the computer wasn't a good looser against me and decided to stop playing all of sudden.

zzzzz its not only time, which are certainly not only centuries when using all computers of the earth on that task anyway. It is also about memory, you need to store all calculated positions somewhere.

To give you perspective. there 10^45 legal chess positions. Thats aprox 9×10^35 Terabyte of memory. Using 4 terabyte harddrives, that are aprox. 2*10^35 harddrives. Each weighing 690g (hitatchi ultrastar) that are aprox 10^32 tons. Earth having the mass of 6*10^21 tons. Thats the mass of 26 millions of earths.

An interesting open question to humanity is, if both players play perfectly, is it a draw or is white going to win?