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Hex (board game)

board game

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 31, 2026
Entity authorityQ844874 ↗
Source-derived summary

Hex (also called Nash) is a two-player abstract strategy board game in which players attempt to connect opposite sides of a rhombus-shaped board made of hexagonal cells. Hex was invented by mathematician and poet Piet Hein in 1942 and later rediscovered and popularized by John Nash.

It is traditionally played on an 11×11 rhombus board, although 13×13 and 19×19 boards are also popular. It can also be played with paper and pencil on hexagonally ruled graph paper. The board is composed of hexagons called cells or hexes. Each player is assigned a pair of opposite sides of the board, which they must try to connect by alternately placing a stone of their color onto any empty hex. Once placed, the stones are never moved or removed. A player wins when they successfully connect their sides together through a chain of adjacent stones. Draws are impossible in Hex due to the topology of the game board.

Despite the simplicity of its rules, the game has deep strategy and sharp tactics.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Hex (board game)” as board game. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around board and game.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1942—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1940. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with board and game providing the first useful test.
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Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q844874. The Library of Congress control number is sh00002104. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hex (board game)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.