I had a nice surprise last night. My Hexels finally arrived! For the uninitiated, Hexels are a Kickstarter project, the first and only one I’ve ever funded. They’re are magnetic, modular playing pieces for the awesome game, Settlers of Catan. Settlers uses dozens of thin hexagonal cardboard tiles to create a game board. The flat edges where hex tiles meet are where you place your roads and cities and settlements are placed on the adjoining corners of hex tiles. During “spirited” game play, these hex tiles can shift quite a bit, and this hextatonic shifting can wreck havoc on borders and as roads and townships sink into these fissures. Hexels solve this problem it a simple and elegant way. Each Hexel is a plastic frame with a recess in the middle that holds one of the cardboard resource tiles. There are magnets on each side of the Hexel frame, so when assembling a Catan playing board, the Hexels all just snap together and STAY together!
I love board games and I’ve always wanted to fund something on Kickstarter and I thought this was a pretty cool idea. I had ideas of my own for special Catan board like laying out a hex grid on a sheet of thin metal and skinning some magentic vinyl to look like the Catan gaming pieces but Hexels are so much simpler and even at $35, probably much cheaper.
I haven’t had time to assemble them yet, but here’s some “unboxing” pics I took as soon as they arrived:
I’ve got some SuperGlue in the garage, and I’m hoping to take some more photos of the assembly process. I need to have these ready for our New Year’s Eve game-a-thon!