Small Changes
Do you play open-handed? Do you let players choose tiles? Alternate ways to play can engage your friends, keep the game fresh, or resolve pain points - it all depends on what works best for you. Have a small change you’ve enjoyed, or play the game in a completely unique, brand new way? Submit a Pull Request with the ruleset label and we’ll figure out if it is best suited for this page or it’s own sub page!
Using a Point System
The most common way I play is with a point system. My Hextraction games were too quick before this change, but it’s all about preference and who you play with. My go-to for Points:
- Establish a baseline: scoring a goal is one point. Then for alt-win condition tiles, opt to vote for something that feels rewarding but not instaneous (unless the tile is truly crazy and you want it to be a true win).
- Get creative: Some tiles work all too well as punishments. Take the blue shell tile for example, a quick rule modification, and now the player in first place might lose some points when the shell is destroyed!
- Set a time limit, or a winning score: I’ve done short games at a 5-point cap and medium/long games at 10. Other times, I’ve used a time limit, and the winner is who has the most at the end of the game.
Trust me, you don’t want an hour long stalled game where no one is even close to the winning score! Tune the score amount to the number of players or implement a timer.
Reaching Each Goal
Instead of one goal to win, or points per goal, what if you had to hit every goal? The Goals change refers to requiring scoring in each goal. With a standard board, this just means just scoring in the other goal, but you can increase the challenge through community models like Inaudable’s Modular Hextraction Board.
I find this rule change is most optimal with their models, but not a requirement. Using their the three-segment goal design, if building a standard board with two “goals” you now have six goals. The flexibility of the board and goal design allows you to break up and disperse the goals, add more, or take them away. You can scale the difficulty as you wish.
The spirit of this change is having to navigate the board in different ways to achieve the win, plus introducing conflict as your opponents will likely interfere with you as they play toward a different goal!