Hexdame Tutor

Hexdame Tutor is a classic Mac implementation of Hexdame, a hexagonal-board variant of international draughts devised by Christian Freeling. The program presents the rules of the hex-grid game interactively on the Macintosh, oriented toward players learning the variant rather than competitive engine play.

The game it teaches

Hexdame transposes the moves and captures of standard draughts onto a hexagonal grid, where each cell has six neighbors instead of four. The result is a draughts-family game with a noticeably different geometry of advance and capture.

Tutorial focus

As a tutor, the Mac program is framed around walking a learner through legal moves, captures, and promotions on the hex board, rather than serving primarily as a strong opponent.

Origin

Hexdame is one of several abstract strategy games designed by Dutch inventor Christian Freeling. Small Macintosh tutors for his games circulated during the classic Mac era as a way to introduce the rules in playable form.