Hexa Sort

Place for the merge, not the gap

Every disc stack in Hexa Sort merges with a neighbour that shares its top tone, sliding onto whichever stack is taller. So dropping a tile isn't about finding any empty hex. It's about finding the empty hex that touches a matching top tone. Do that and the stacks fuse; if the tone left showing afterwards matches another neighbour, the merging keeps going, and one well-placed drop can ripple across the board in a chain. Land a tile in open space with no matching neighbour and you've spent a hex for nothing, crowding yourself one cell closer to the end.

Build toward the collect

The payoff is a single-tone stack ten discs tall, which lifts off the board for points and, just as usefully, clears the hex it stood on. So your real aim is to funnel one tone into one growing tower rather than spreading it thin across the grid. Count discs like a shopkeeper. Towers collect at ten, so a seven-tall dark tower needs exactly three more dark discs. If the queue shows a three-stack of darks, you know precisely where it goes; if it shows two, place them where the last one can still arrive later. Players who count stop wasting discs. Players who don't end up with three half-towers of the same tone, none of which will ever reach ten. Ten is the only number the board pays.

• Pick a tone and a spot to be its home, then keep feeding matches toward it.
• Read the queue: the next tile is shown, so place the current one where it sets the next one up.
• Chains do the heavy lifting; a drop that triggers two or three merges beats one that adds a single disc.
• Keep a couple of hexes open as landing room, because a full board with no legal merge is exactly how the game ends.

The queue deserves more respect than it gets. The preview is information: if the coming tile matches your main tower, spend this turn clearing its landing spot; if it matches nothing, decide now which quiet hex will eat it. Strong players place the current tile mostly to make the next one perfect, the way good pool players shoot for position rather than just the pocket.

Causing chains on purpose

A chain isn't luck, it's a question you ask before dropping: after this merge, what tone will be left showing, and who is standing next to it? Say you drop a dark-topped stack beside a taller dark tower. The darks gather together, and the stack you dropped may now be showing the lighter discs that were hiding underneath. If a light-topped tower stands on its other side, that merge fires too. One drop, two merges, three hexes tidied. Setting these up means paying attention to what's buried in each stack, not just what's on top, and it's the single biggest difference between a decent score and a great one.

Use the shape of the board

Not all hexes are equal. A middle cell touches six neighbours, so it's the engine room: drops there have the most merge chances and the most accident chances. Rim cells touch fewer, which makes them quiet. Park awkward stacks there. Better still, pick one rim hex as your junk drawer, far from the main tower, and send every no-match stack to it until a matching top finally appears to empty it. One more habit worth keeping: don't grow two towers of the same tone. They compete for the same discs, and two five-tall towers score nothing while one ten-tall pays out and hands you back a free hex. One tower, fed constantly, is the whole plan.

Why it clicks

Hexa Sort belongs to the wave of cosy merge puzzles that took over casual gaming in the early 2020s, where the whole loop is drop, match, combine, collect. The hex grid is the clever twist: six neighbours per tile instead of four gives every placement more ways to connect, which means more chains, and more maddening near-misses when you clog the board one disc short of a collect. Planning two drops ahead is what separates long games from short ones, and the game quietly teaches it to you one jammed board at a time.