My cactus1, about ten times2 its size from a year3 ago, having had a change of heart about how many ribs4 it has, further contemplates the house next door while snow falls. It and I still live in what I said was only temporary housinge.

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1	Echinopsis subdenudata
2	by volume
3	less one week
4	was seven, now eight

There are few games with rules as simple as those of Hex: two players take turns placing different colored stones on hexagons on a rhomboidal board; once placed, stones are not moved; the first player (in this example, red) wins by completing an unbroken chain from the top edge to the bottom; the second player wins by making a chain of (blue) stones connecting the other two edges. That's it ‑‑ except for the pie rule, customarily used to neutralize the advantage of going first. Hex scales to any desired size of board; the larger the board, the more subtle the strategy. (Blue resigned in a game that reached the position shown here.) Hex and Go are both harder to program than chess (although Hex is easier to program than Go). Computers cannot yet beat good human players at either game on larger board sizes. Hex strategy shares with Go a tension between grouping stones and yet controlling broad areas. Hex is unforgiving; one weak move can doom you. Hex never ends in a draw. The game always ends in a finite number of moves, and never without one player forming a winning chain. When I study the games of the best Hex players, I am struck by how they sometimes play moves that at first seem out in left field and yet turn out to be just what was called for. Hex is a relatively new game and is a specialized taste, but I think it has what it takes to become better known. The most active site for online Hex nowadays is littlegolem.net, which hosts Hex games in board sizes 13×13 and 19×19. Several Hex programs are available. Hexilla is not the strongest but it runs on any browser equipped with Java.

raccoon eyeshine.