IQ-Hexagon

When I mentioned that creating the IQ-Deluxe games was a step outside my comfort zone, I truly meant it. Normally, I focus more on the conceptual aspects of a game. I’m very much an old-school designer who believes in the principle of "form follows function." When the only function of a puzzle is that all pieces need to fit, most of the development work comes down to styling, which is not really what I want to do as an inventor and product designer.

Creating a packing puzzle based on hexagons could have been the simplest task in the world. Hexagonal grids are ideal for  puzzles, because it’s so easy to fill up a game board with regular six-sided pieces: you can hardly do anything wrong. That’s exactly why so many puzzle and board games use this grid, resulting in a sea of games that often look indistinguishable from one another. The strength and familiarity of a hexagonal pattern, reminiscent of a beehive, make it appealing but also predictable boring. Therefore my goal was to create a puzzle on a hexagonal grid without using pieces that resembled hexagons—and I achieved this by simplifying the puzzle pieces so they appeared to be made of straight lines. The result is a game that stands apart, both in design and difficulty. IQ-Hexagon is much harder than the other games in the IQ-Deluxe series. As a result, it includes more MASTER and WIZARD-level challenges and fewer STARTER or JUNIOR ones, making it the opposite of IQ-Circle. Several factors contribute to its difficulty. First, it has the highest number of puzzle pieces among the games in this category (12 instead of 10 or 11). In a packing puzzle, the difficulty increases exponentially with the number of pieces, especially when solutions must be unique and the setups provide minimal hints. Second, while the solved puzzle appears to completely fill the grid, small triangular gaps remain between the simplified puzzle pieces. These gaps are not immediately obvious when you begin solving a challenge, and their locations in the final solution are unpredictable. This makes it difficult to visualize where pieces should fit, particularly in open sections of the grid where many pieces need to be placed together. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the key goals of the IQ-Deluxe series was to ensure each game had its own distinct character. While IQ-Pentagon feels intricate and sharp, IQ-Hexagon is soft and rounded. The puzzle pieces are made from thermoplastic rubber (TPR), which not only makes them enjoyable to manipulate but also ensures the game is remarkably quiet—an added bonus. 

That said, I usually prefer working on games with a strong theme or innovative mechanics, rather than those where the design itself takes center stage. Here’s hoping I’ll have the opportunity to focus on that approach again for the games I will develop for 2026, because working on 6 different IQ’s in the same year, was a bit too much form and too little function for my taste.  Although it did have one benefit: the game rules I had to write this year were the shortest and easiest in my career ;-)