Hexappeal

Hex Appeal is an original puzzle game by Ronan Dowling, published in 2001 under his BigFishLittleFish Software label. The aim, in the author's words, is to "unscramble a hexagonal grid of colored pieces in a given number of moves" - a hex-tiled cousin of Sokoban with a Rubik's-Cube twist on the input.

The mechanic

The board is a hexagonal grid of colored beads sitting on colored tiles; the win condition is to get every bead onto a tile of its matching color. Clicking a tile rotates the six surrounding pieces clockwise. Scoring is built around minimizing clicks per level, so the puzzle is as much about route-finding as it is about color sorting.

Custom levels

A built-in board editor ships with the game, letting players design and trade their own hex layouts rather than being limited to Dowling's bundled set. The editor is the main reason Hex Appeal stayed in circulation on Mac shareware sites well after its 2001 release.

System requirements

From the BinHex header: a PowerPC Macintosh or greater, 256 colors at 640x480 (with thousands or millions of colors recommended), and either OS 9.0+ or OS 8.6 with CarbonLib and Appearance Manager - or, alternatively, Mac OS X. Dowling closes the requirements list with "a spare minute or two," framing it as a coffee-break puzzle.

Provenance

Distributed through Info-Mac as hexappeal-10.hqx with the author noting "I give permission for this game to be included on commercial CD's." Author contact is ronan@ronandowling.com; the original BigFishLittleFish landing page lived at ronandowling.com/bflf/. Macintosh Garden mirrors v1.0 with three screenshots under the slug hex-appeal.