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Knee Deep in Hexes is like deck building meets all your favorite 90's RTS games combined - but this time it's a board game.
Knee Deep in Hexes is a 2-player strategy skirmisher. After the exodus from Earth, you fight on a distant desert planet for scarce resources, build extractors, factories and units - from fast construction vehicles to frightening Paloozas.
Get knee-deep into intergalactic warfare: Choose your companions with their set of game-breaking skills, build your deck out of unique strategy cards and outsmart your enemy: Win by either destroying their headquarter or by sending their most valuable units to the scrapyard as quickly as possible.
Each player chooses a faction first. Every faction consists of four companions - the General, who oversees the battlefield from the planetary orbit, the Commander, who draws on many years of experience in combat and adjusts tactics rapidly, the Tech, who supports the troops by steady innovations and the Trickster who is outsmarting the enemy. Each companion comes with a unique deck of action and war cards. Players can either use these predefined decks or, if they are advanced, engage in deckbuilding in search of ever unique combos.
The same high variability applies to the map: Here you can either use a predefined casual variant for a quick match or build a world before the game starts by drafting planetary cards. We are already designing and playtesting new factions, companions and decks as well as worlds.
In this action-packed game, you'll have very little time to secure your basic supplies - that is, build the first construction vehicles and build the first extractors to harvest materials and energy - before clashing with your opponent on the tight map.
Play action cards during your turn to gain unique strategic advantages and take the initiative on the battlefield. Gather your tanks, carefully plan the use of your war cards, which will give you powerful bonuses in battle - and declare the war zone you want to attack. But beware, here comes the big twist: the battle in the war zone you declare will not take place directly at the end of your turn, but at the end of the turn of your opponent. Your enemies have a whole turn to react, to redeploy troops or to suddenly stab you in the back somewhere else. So be one hundred percent sure before you act!
—description from the publisher
- Offers a lot of strategic thinking.
- Evokes PC RTS vibe.
- War zone mechanic is thoughtful and cool.
- Allows for aggressive or defensive positioning.
- Moving structures around is fun.
- Can lead to dumb fun moments.
- Saving grace card from mulligan.
- Thematic elements.
- Daniel's inability to count pieces.
- Wasted turret.
- tactical sci-fi war
- Starcraft
- Age of Empires II
- Supreme Commander
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- action selection — Players perform two actions per turn, with various options like building, moving, playing cards, drawing, or recycling.
- Area Control — The 'war zone' mechanic involves players competing for control of an area on the map.
- building — Players can build vehicles or structures using red materials, with some vehicles required for structures.
- Card Play — Action cards can be played if conditions are met, and war cards are used during combat.
- Combat — Players engage in combat by playing war cards and accumulating combat points to deal damage.
- Deck Building — Players mash companions together to make one deck.
- Movement — Units can move as much as energy allows, with some units and structures having extra movement capabilities.
- Resource Management — Players get resources on their turn to spend on actions like building and playing cards.
- Set Collection — Playing a card requires having two structures in the war zone.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Keep the pile death balling moving forward.
- This is heresy.
- DO ME A FAVOR AND JUST LOSE.
- I love dumb stuff like this.
- Moving my structures around is the funniest thing ever.
- I pulled some [ __ ] out of my ass and won this game somehow off the back of a card that I got off a mulligan and thought was not actually going to be useful at all and that turned out to be my saving grace. And also Daniel's inability to count the pieces available to him.