TyreForHyre: Oh, Hexcells! I was searching BoardGameGeek for Matthew Brown, because I assumed we were still on the subject of board games. Yeah, the Hexcells series is awesome.

Proysen: Ohhhh! I didn't grok the part about the markings on the cards serving as blockers. In that case, your variation isn't nearly as broken as I thought.

Mathgrant -- The proposed line can only go through the center of a piece if the center is empty. You would still be able to block if you placed cards with a filled center, but there would be more emphasis on which way certain cards were facing.

White's 2468 piece is a very safe play, however, since no line can go through it.

The illustration I provided is biased towards white for demonstration purposes only. In a real game, both sides would have an equal amount of pieces in play.

Ahh, just the creator of Hexcells and the like.

TyreForHyre, who's Matthew Brown?

Proysen, I'm 99.9999% certain that rotating a piece is allowed. The acrylic edition of the game doesn't feature logos on the pieces to establish any one orientation as more "correct" than the other ones.

Also, your proposed variant seems to break the game. If White opens with the 2468 piece, he cannot possibly be blocked from making a winning arrangement in the next 4 turns. If Black blocks the space above, White just plays the space above that, and similarly for the other 4 directions.

Here is an additional variant for the game, if anyone is interested: illustration. [pasteboard.co]

I assume you can rotate the piece during placement or when you have reached the movement phase near the end of the game? The rules don't specifically mention rotation other than the increased amount of patterns available if it is included.

A very fun thinker's game nonetheless.

This looks like a rather devious and awesome logic game, gonna have to give this a spin sometime this week, thanks for the port!

Also glad to see someone else plays and enjoys Matthew Brown's games, you have great taste.