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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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My mom picked up a copy of Six as a gift for me at a clearance bin at a Barnes and Nobel a few years back. I had never heard of the game before but I thought “Eh, how bad could it be? Thanks, Mom.” After all, I do enjoy abstracts quite a bit, particularly ones designed with a shorter playing time in mind.
And, much to surprise, Six came out of nowhere to be a game that regularly hits the table. It’s a game that almost always ends up in my bag on trips and it’s a game that my fiancé and I will play pretty much at the drop of a hat. It has become one of our go-to games to play several times in a row.
If you’ve ever played Hive, it’s probably impossible not to compare the two games when you see Six. They are both games where the pieces are chunky hexes (although Hive’s pieces are super-cool bakelite compared to Six’s more prosaic wooden hexes) and the pieces are what form the board. However, Hive is a darling of the gaming world while Six is more of “That guy, third from the right, at the back of the bar”
Despite that (and despite thinking that Hive is pretty darn nifty myself), several of the people who I’ve introduced Six to have liked it more than Hive. I think that’s because Six is even more elegantly simple than Hive since all the pieces do the exact same thing. Even the apparent three ending conditions is simpler than it sounds. Six does not have three different endgame conditions, it has three variations on the same endgame condition.
Six is very simple to teach. Place pieces. If no one’s won by the time they’re all out, start moving pieces. Whoever forms one of three patterns of six pieces first wins. It’s that simple. There are variant rules where you can break the board apart but I’ve never felt the need to use them. The basic game has always proved interesting enough and I’m not sure the ability to discard pieces would make the game deeper, just more dynamic.
Six has that delicious feature of a good abstract, that the simple rules offer complex choices. The placement rules and the movement rules are simple but open-ended. That means that gameplay doesn’t have to be formulaic. Six is a game of patterns and the more you play it, the more patterns will emerge.
Six tends to very much a game of cat-and-mouse, where both players try to set up traps, preferably ones where they can form a pattern that lets them win the game in more than one way. While it is true that it could end up with the players constantly stale-mating each other, I’ve found that the open-ended play means that there are too many options for one player to forever keep the other in check.
Six may have a dull name, boring-looking pieces and no big name designer or publisher attached to it so it’s easy to overlook. However, I have gotten in dozens of plays and I’m pretty sure I’ll get in plenty more in the future. Scratch its rough surface and you’ll find a diamond of an abstract underneath.
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