Just few day before Essen here a preview for Hexemonia thank you to iSlayThe Dragon

If you didn’t figure it out from the title or the pictures of the tiles over there, Hexemonia is a game about hexes.  More specifically, it’s about building a city state from those hexes.  But in the world of tile placement, resource management games you’re going to have to do more than just add an extra two sides to the tiles to stick out from the crowd.

I hadn’t heard of Hexemonia until seeing it’s entry in the Essen preview of BGG earlier this week and the artwork on the tiles is absolutely gorgeous and reminds me of a city building computer game.  Even though the artwork initially caught my attention it was this preview from last month over on Opinionated Gamers that really sold me on the game.

One of the intriguing ideas in Hexemonia is how you manage your resources.  Not only do not need the correct resources to expand your city state (by acquiring new tiles) but you’ll want the right resources on tiles in order to activate them.  You’ll have the balance between expanding and keeping your resources around to power your current buildings.  Simply producing enough resources to do everything that you want will present it’s own problem by leading to revolts or making you a tempting target to the other players.  This leads to the other way that Hexemonia sets itself apart from other tile placement games, by providing more interaction between players.  What’s a game set in ancient Greece without a little bit of fighting.  Fabio mentions that players might be content to each build up their own city states without bothering each other or they can pick fights to slow down their opponents while advancing their own position.

Hexemonia looks to be a beautiful and innovative step forward for tile laying games that really embraces the struggle of managing limited resources.  Also, we could use more games with hexes!  Beautiful beautiful Hexes.