Joy Of Hex

The Joy Of Hex is a turn-based, hex-map strategy wargame released in 2000 by hobbyist developer Single Brain Cell. Modelled on classic battalion-level World War II board wargames such as the V for Victory and World At War series, it ships with around fifty pre-built scenarios and a full editor for designing unlimited custom maps and orders of battle.

Plan-and-execute combat

Like the paper games it draws from, Joy Of Hex separates orders from action. Each turn the player issues movement and fire commands to every unit on the hexagonal map, then watches the simultaneous resolution play out: spotted enemies, opportunity fire, blocked advances and broken stacks all emerge from the plan rather than from twitch input. The result is a relatively slow but cerebral game where most of the difficulty lies in anticipating where the enemy will be by the time your own orders take effect.

Scenarios and editor

The shareware download bundles roughly fifty hand-built scenarios spanning Eastern Front, Western Front and North African engagements. The included scenario editor exposes the same data the bundled scenarios use - terrain, unit stats, victory conditions, reinforcement schedules - so players willing to read the documentation can build entirely new battles or convert favourites from print wargames into Joy Of Hex form.

Macintosh release and legacy

The 1.4.0 build distributed through Macintosh Garden is a fat binary covering both 68k and PowerPC machines under Mac OS 8 through 9, packaged as a 3.4 MB StuffIt archive. Single Brain Cell later opened the engine as the GPL-licensed Joy Of Hex project on SourceForge, where the code was carried forward to Linux and BSD with computer-AI, hot-seat and play-by-email opponents - a rare second life for a small Classic Mac strategy title.