by blinks
Two to four players, best with two, good with any amount.
About half an hour to play, longer with more players.
A hex-based, tile-laying, post-apocalyptic strategy game. How much better can it get? It plays well with two, uses variable player powers (think Starcraft's Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, and you're halfway there), and has a hand-management mechanic that gets the brain burning. For more casual strategy gamers I'll pull out Small World, but if someone wants a challenge, out comes The Hex.
Neuroshima Hex is actually based on a Polish RPG (Neuroshima) set in a story-ridden post-apocalyptic world of robots and mutants. The Hex itself reeks of background, with fully half of the player aids devoted to the place your team holds in the RPG. Fortunately the game plays just as well without that background, and it just serves for some light flavoring.
Each turn, the active player draws some hexes from their deck, discards at least one hex, and plays some hexes. Some of your hexes are units, which you play by positioning them on an empty space on the board, where direction matters. Other hexes are actions, which you play by acting, then discarding the hex. Note that there is no combat phase.
To battle, you must draw and play a battle hex; timing is everything. Since you win by destroying other headquarters (or by scoring VPs by damaging them in my preferred variant), you need to wait until positions are favorable. However, the hex takes space in your hand (max size: two!), so you shouldn't wait too long after drawing it. You have a limited number of battles in your deck, so discarding it is a difficult decision to make, but occasionally necessary. Fortunately for your brain, battles are completely predictable. You can look at the board and determine exactly what will happen if you play that hex. The ramifications of that might not be immediately apparent, though...
Everything in Neuroshima revolves around the battle, and this cycle of build-up and destroy. The first few rounds, few tiles are on the board, and battles will have little to no effect. As the game builds up, the board gets more and more crowded (pieces don't often move, and the field is snug), until a battle is practically necessary to clear it. Once the battle happens, lots of pieces leave the board, since most have only a single hit point. The build-up happens again, the battle tears everything down again. 'War never changes.'
Hex is big on positioning. Your board position is often very static (though some races change that a bit), meaning that the decision of how to rotate a piece can make or break the game. Pieces have triangles on them to notate the direction and strength of attacks -- one short triangle points in the direction of a melee attack that does one damage, while three long triangles point in the direction of a three-damage ranged attack. Different races have different units available, including brawlers that do melee damage to three adjacent sides, and net fighters that disable a unit on one side of them. The board state can quickly get complicated when you have four players.
You play until you run out of tiles or until someone hits 20 damage/VPs (which rarely happens in my games), making a built-in time limit that keeps things short and play tense. The tile pile has other effects on the game, as well -- the number of each tile in your deck is public information, and everyone knows what you've seen, what you've discarded, and what's in your hand. If you've gone through all five battle tiles in your deck, they know that you can't initiate another. If you've used your single sniper tile, people no longer need to play around it. If both players in a two-player game have gone through all their battle tiles, the rest of the game can be rather boring. Fortunately, you get one last battle when the game ends, ensuring that things get a final shake-up.
Play with three or four people has interesting issues -- if you play for HQ damage, you get player elimination, which can be generally unhappy. The game's time limit mitigates that problem somewhat, though. If you play with damage-as-VPs, one player's HQ could end up out in the open, basically just acting as a VP farm and a degenerate strategy for the other players. With four players, playing on teams mitigates this quite a bit.
In all, recommended for anyone looking for an interesting strategy game to add to the collection. Neuroshima Hex plays well with two, putting it into an elite group, and can be played in under an hour, making it more unique still. It's a tile-placement hex game to boot, and the different races give each game a different feel. Give it a shot with your Chess or Go buddy, and let me know what you think."
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