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How to Play

The durable mental model for your first HexArena match: what you are trying to do, how to move and build, and the rules that catch newcomers out.

Your objective

A match puts you on a hex map with up to five other commanders, human or bot. You win by being the last commander left standing, or by holding the most territory when the match clock runs out. Everything below serves those two goals: grow an economy, raise armies, and take ground.

The game itself includes a built-in Tutorial that walks you through your first actions hands-on. It runs inside the game, not from this page, so start a match and open the Tutorial when you want a guided first game. This guide is the map you keep in your head afterwards.

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Moving and building

Four controls cover almost everything you do in a match:

  • Move the camera with the W, A, S, D keys, or by dragging with the middle mouse button.
  • Zoom in and out with the mouse wheel.
  • Build by choosing a building, then placing it on one of your tiles. Each building has a job, and where you place it matters.
  • Move an army by dragging it out of a building toward one of the six hex directions. Armies march in straight lines along those six directions.
A blue army positioned on a hex map with open ground between its building and an enemy village.
Drag an army out of its building toward one of the six directions. It marches in a straight line, then turns back toward home.

Your first economy

Build your economy before you fight. Placement drives its speed, and adjacency to one of your villages is what makes it fast.

  • Village — your economic anchor. It unlocks resource production and earns gold. Leave a little room around it for the resource buildings that feed off it.
  • Forester — placed next to a forest, it produces wood. Keep it next to a village for full-speed production.
  • Quarry — placed next to a mountain, it produces stone. Like the forester, it works fastest next to a village.
  • Farm — placed next to a village, each farm raises your food capacity, which is what lets you keep more armies in the field.
A hex map with a village beside resource buildings, forests, and mountains.
A village anchors your economy. Foresters, quarries, and farms work fastest when they sit next to one of your villages.

Your first army

Once gold, wood, and stone are flowing, turn to force. Armies let you take tiles far faster than buying them one at a time with gold.

  • Camp — the forward post you use to stage units and start capturing extra tiles.
  • Barracks — upgrade a camp into a barracks and it trains units automatically, as long as your food balance allows another army.
  • Expansion — send armies out to capture ground. This is cheaper than buying tile after tile with gold, and it is how you press toward your opponents.
  • Automatic combat — armies fight on their own the moment they meet an enemy. You choose where they go; the fighting resolves itself.
A hex map where an attacking army meets a defending force beside a garrisoned building that fires on the attackers.
Armies fight automatically on contact. A building with units inside defends itself, firing on attackers within reach.

Rules that surprise newcomers

A few rules decide more games than any single unit does:

  • Territory must stay connected. Your reach extends from connected ground. An area that keeps its link to home stays strong.
  • Cut-off armies retreat and are vulnerable. If a marching group loses its link to friendly territory, it turns for home and will not fight on the way back, which leaves it exposed.
  • Garrisons defend themselves. Units left inside a building fire on nearby attackers, so a defended building is far harder to take than open ground.
  • Armies move at most six tiles. After marching six tiles, an army turns around and walks back to where it started. Plan reach around that limit.
A hex map showing a home base joined to a forward area by a narrow corridor that has been pinched, leaving the forward area at risk of being cut off.
Expansion works through connected territory. A forward area joined by a thin corridor is the first thing to fall if that link is cut.

Choices for your next match

Once the basics feel natural, these choices give you finer control over how your armies behave:

  • Unit selection — hold 1, 2, or 3 while you drag to send only that type of unit, and leave the rest behind.
  • Automatic paths — hold Shift while giving move orders to queue a path your army follows on its own.
  • Target priorities — click an enemy building to mark it as a priority target so your ranged units focus it; click it again to clear the mark.