Hextris

Play:

Full screen Touch: tap the left or right half to spin · Keyboard: left and right arrows

About:

Four high-school students built this in a weekend and it went straight to the front page of Hacker News. It takes about ten seconds to understand and a long time to get good at: the hexagon spins one face at a time, colours stack outward, and the speed climbs until you make one bad rotation and lose four layers at once.

It was designed for a touchscreen first, which is rarer than it sounds — tapping either half of the screen spins the hexagon, and that is the entire control scheme.

Credits:

Made by Logan Engstrom, Garrett Finucane, Noah Moroze and Michael Yang, 2014. Published here under the GPL-3.0 licence. Source code.

Phone check: 2026-09-08: retrospective review - confirmed tap-to-rotate on phone and arrow-key rotate on desktop both work correctly by reading MainHex's own rotation angle before/after real input (30->90->30 on touch, 30->-30 on ArrowLeft). Found and removed a third-party analytics script (hextris.io/a.js) being injected on every load, and fixed a mixed-content http font link to https.

Play next:

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Bug Traffic Bees, bumblebees, dragonflies and ladybirds drift into the garden. Draw each one a path home to the flowers of its colour, and never let two of them bump.

Constellation Pop Clear constellations from a drifting sky-chart. Tap a cluster of two or more matching stars and the whole constellation fades out; the stars above fall in, empty columns slide shut, and if you plan it right one tap can cascade the chart clean.

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Tags:

puzzle · arcade · one more go