Hexcite is a fairly obscure GBC game based on an equally obscure board game. Here, the 50 problems of Practice Mode are completed as fast as possible.
Game objectives
Hexcite is
a Japanese board game based around filling up a triangular grid of hexagons, where points are scored based on how many sides your tile touches, and if you can fill one of the large hexagons. Hexcite: The Shapes of Victory is a GBC version of said board game, which includes a Practice Mode, with fifty games about to finish that you need to get victory in, similar to
chess problems.
Victory is always by five points, the minimum possible, so most problems have only one perfect solution, which did make this a lot easier to make than might be expected, as there were rarely times when I had to compare many different approaches.
There is possibly room for improvement. I don't know if all the solutions are the most optimal. There were a couple I found more than one way of completing, and I went with the quickest version, but other problems may also have solutions I missed.
It is possible to occasionally save a frame when you start moving a tile, but I couldn't work out when it lets you do it. Also, there seem to be frame rules, so most of the time it wouldn't actually save any overall frames. See
this forum thread for some of my findings.
Also, while I don't believe there is any RNG, and the AI is completely deterministic, it might be possible to influence the AI to pick quicker moves. There are a couple of times when there are a couple of equally good moves it can make, and it doesn't always pick the quicker of the two.
feos: Even though the environment here is a board game, the Practice Mode is just a set of puzzles with certain solutions. Gameplay does not look very entertaining, but it's still a typical puzzle game speedrun where precision makes it clearly superior to a human playthrough. Just like with chess problems, solving those re-defined puzzles is not a board game in itself, even though in actual Hexcite play those scenarios may occur. So this movie doesn't count as
a board game being in Vault. Accepting.
